When It's Over I Want To Know Who I Was (2-2)

Schmincke oils on canvas. Size: 40 x 50 cm, Anton Terziev, 2024
From No Time For Losers seriеs (2019-)

Photo: © the artist
Courtesy the artist

(Foto material used: Charles Oliveira by Chris Unger/ Zuffa LLC after UFC 274, 2022)

Steps of the making of the work

Anton Terziev’s When It’s Over I Want To Know Who I Was (2-2) is a raw testament to both triumph and tumult. Executed in thickly worked impasto, the oil’s crimson and magenta tones surge across the canvas, their relentless texture echoing the raw physicality of the subject’s moment of victory. The intense chiaroscuro—deep blacks plunging the background into shadow—amplifies the figure’s contorted profile, as though spotlighting both the exaltation and the bruises that mark the fight.

Terziev channels modern anxieties through this depiction of a celebrated MMA athlete: the almost grotesque layering of paint mirrors society’s appetite for violence and spectacle, while the tension in every ridge suggests the weight of expectation and the dread of failure. Part of the No Time For Losers series, this work confronts viewers with our own complicity in demanding brutality, and asks whether our thirst for conquest ultimately erodes our shared values.