Adrian Ghenie's "Charles Darwin as a Young Man" (2013) is a powerful example of the artist's distinctive approach to historical portraiture, combining gestural abstraction with figuration. The work features Ghenie's characteristic thick impasto application and layered, distressed surfaces in earthy tones of browns, grays, and muted pinks. The subject emerges through aggressive brushwork and palette knife marks, creating a haunting, partially obscured portrait that challenges traditional notions of historical representation.