Born 1977 Baia-Mare, Romania
Lives and works in Cluj and Berlin.
Adrian Ghenie is a young Romanian painter whose works demonstrate his fascination with history and the trauma of dictatorship. The sources for his images are derived from a combination of his own personal memories and from historical books, archives and both documentary and fictional film.
Ghenie plunders visual history via disparate avenues - archives, history books, cinema, painting, YouTube and Google - to build his dense, multi-layered paintings. His preparations are intriguing in their ebb and flow between fact and fabrication. Once images are selected from different modes of representation, Ghenie creates collages with printed images that are overworked and embellished in paint. Sometimes he turns stills into cardboard models, creating a kind of mini film set, tangible, with shifting light and relative scale.
Cinema’s aesthetic preoccupies Ghenie, particularly the moment cinema developed its own unique qualities: when scenes were created, seen and understood as nothing but filmic – movement, light, structure, genre, and moments repeated in different productions to the point of cliché that could not be separated from that medium, just as the surface and qualities of a Caravaggio can only really exist in paint.
Ever since the Wall fell in 1989, Berlin has been the city that artists have defected to—in part for the cheap living and studio space, in part to get away from the hungry market and social swirl, and in part for all of the dirty, glamorous decadence that has made the fraught German capitol a place of myth and mayhem for generations of young misfits. Artists don’t come to Berlin to make it big—they come to be artists, and today, a new crop of international creators have arrived to make the city their own.
With figures gnawed and slashed, blurred and speckled, Adrian Ghenie’s paintings involve the big ideas that transform men into larger-than-life emblems. Ghenie’s recent exhibition at Haunch of Venison in London featured humans wildly distorted and many with monkey features. The canvases were inspired by the Nazi’s ideological bastardization of Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection. “No discovery is ever good or bad—it depends on how you use it,” says Ghenie, although his portraits frequently feel cautionary and almost malicious in their gestural violence. Take for example his depictions of notorious Holocaust doctor and torturer Dr. Josef Mengele, his features scraped away or washed out. Other faces are patchworks of textures, so skin appears as if sourced from different ages. It’s pretty brutal stuff. “Reading the biography of Mengele, you realize the Nazis were normal, obscure bureaucrats—then something happens that corrupts them,” says Ghenie. “It could happen to you or me or anyone.” Indeed, the show included a silhouette of the artist himself, wearing a mask of Darwin’s features. It’s an approach that’s no doubt additionally charged for an artist who is based in Berlin. The 34-year-old moved part-time to the city in 2007 from Cluj, Romania. Growing up in a small industrial town, Ghenie compared official painters from his native country with the classics of the Western canon, while his personal brushes with art come largely from the experiences of his parents. Ironically, the time of communist insularity of the ’50s and ’60s proved to be the era of greatest freedom for his parents, who traveled across Eastern Europe in the ’60s and ’70s and imparted those memories to their son. Ghenie sees a connection with those family tales and his own artistic production: “I like the difference between the official story and the personal perspective.”
Adrian Ghenie: Haunch of Venison London from Haunch of Venison on Vimeo.
MATEOBANKS
Francis Bacon reincarnate.
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2 years ago 1 Like
Jon shaw
I absolutely love the darkness to these. In terms of painting approach they are super nice in terms of looseness of application of paint and control of colour. Imagery is a perfect balance (for me) between representational and abstract - bang on!
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1 year ago
Ramireo
The person with the coat is GREAT!
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1 year ago
Gene
His work remind me a bit of Francis Bacon. Very interesting use of colors!
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1 year ago
anny
i always come back to this artist, he's really inspired me. it's definitely one of my favorites.
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1 year ago
selina
so gorgeous...
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2 years ago
rob
these things hurt me!
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2 years ago
Cathal O'Blivion
Amazing work - reminds me of Bacon and Goya
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2 years ago
Antoniou Nikolas
truly amazing!
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2 years ago
karin
nice knowing who made the latest 'get well soon' LP cover :>
vexations by get well soon
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2 years ago
africa spear chucker
i think bacon was a drunk queen from the distant future who did bad revisions of this guys pictorial space.
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2 years ago
Savannah
eerie and mesmerizing. like weird russian film noir movie stills or something.
loving this so hard.
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2 years ago
rob
awesome! Francis Bacon comes to mind
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2 years ago
Alin Dragulin
makes me want to paint again, though when I try all I can think about is,........
the accident
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2 years ago
mila
some of the bests things i've seen on here
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2 years ago
Andrew Gordon
One of my all time faves! Thanks for posting Jeff
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2 years ago
Jeff Hamada
one of mine too!
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2 years ago in reply to Andrew Gordon
Bosco
My god, my god!
Man,I want his babies.
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2 years ago
yasmin
I absolutely love the first one.
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2 years ago
Maya
yummy and twisted.
what's going on in the background of that last painting?
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2 years ago
malouma
I guy is filming something.
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2 years ago in reply to Maya
jesper
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these paintings are truly ghenieus !
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