Often creating paintings of stills from his own video work, Podwil, more recently, has looked to pre-existing footage for the stepping point into his painting. Two years ago, Podwil began a new series based on a clip of a 1983 meeting between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War. Since beginning this series of paintings, Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his position and Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death. While a single frame from this documentation has been isolated, Podwil, using a variety of scale, ratio, palette and cropping, captures the essence of this moment in history while, through distillation, abstracting it. With the figures disappearing into the stately couch of the opulent backlit room, the viewer is left with alternating moments of political poignancy and assured gestures of painting.