The present work refers to revelations of secret US files in connection with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Holzer, whose artistic beginnings lie in abstract painting, explores these documents in a series of works and transfers the redacted passages from the censored papers onto canvas. Holzer began her Top Secret series in 2012 - the first hand-painted works in the Redacted Paintings series, in which redacted US government documents served as the basis for a series of works. The first Redacted Paintings were produced using the silkscreen process, in which Holzer first replaced the censored elements in the form of prints with distorted stripes or solid shapes in black. In the next step, the artist began to transform the documents into coloured images by hand, as in the present work.
