Virgil Abloh’s Branded in Time (2018, Screenprint) is a layered meditation on identity, temporality, and the tension between personal presence and cultural commodification. The work fuses figurative portraiture with graphic abstraction, presenting a spectral face that emerges and dissolves amid overlapping washes of red, grey, black, and yellow.

The portrait, intense and watchful, feels suspended between visibility and erasure—an image haunted by time. Over this figure, Abloh introduces bold graphic elements, such as circular forms reminiscent of commercial logos or Murakami-esque pop motifs, disrupting the human likeness with the language of branding. This collision creates an uneasy dialogue between individuality and the systems that seek to package, replicate, and define it.

The distressed, layered surface—built from painterly smears, silkscreen textures, and stark contrasts—heightens the sense of temporality, as though the image itself is eroding before the viewer’s eyes. The title, Branded in Time, underscores this duality: to be “branded” is both to be marked indelibly and to be consumed by the machinery of commerce.

In this work, Abloh draws together themes central to his practice: the blurring of high art and commercial design, the fragility of personal identity within mass culture, and the way visual language defines how we are remembered. Branded in Time resonates as both a portrait and a critique—an image suspended between permanence and disappearance, art and advertisement.