Adrian Ghenie: Painting as an Act of Hooliganism
Installation view of the exhibition Hooligans at Pace, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2021.
“Montage … is what makes visible [ce qui fait voir].”
Jean-Luc Godard[1]
By Irina Sheynfeld
Feb. 2, 2021
Adrian Ghenie’s most recent work, nine paintings and three drawings, is now on display at Pace Gallery in Chelsea. Ghenie, who is arguably one of the most important artists of his generation, was born in Baia Mare, Romania in 1977, now lives and works mostly in Berlin. His art is often compared to that of Gerhard Richter, Arshile Gorky, and Francis Bacon. The raw palette and unsettling subject matter that unites these artists in part come from a shared post-WWII history and its complicated legacy. Similar to Bacon’s work, most of Ghenie’s paintings appear to be flying apart, as if they were exploding from within. There is also a magical aspect to Ghenie’s art that echoes Peter Doig’s dark, kaleidoscopic world.
Even though Ghenie’s oeuvre presents a wide range of subjects and themes, the artist seems to come back again and again to a reinterpretation of the roles of a few select historical figures, such as Van Gogh, Charles Darwin, and Abraham Lincoln(?). In 2015 Ghenie represented Romania at the Venice Biennale with a large canvas of a more notorious historical figure: Doctor Josef Mengele, who was known as the Angel of Death ( Todesengel), responsible for inhumane medical experiments at Auschwitz during WWII. (In 2016, Doctor Josef Mengele was sold at Christie’s for GBP 398,500.) Similar to Richter’s smudged portraits of Aunt Marianne (1965) and Uncle Rudi (1965), Ghenie’s portraits are partially obscured. His subjects' features are raw and skinless, their flesh melting off the bones as they elude recognition and quick interpretation.
In Ghenie’s show The Hooligans, on view at Pace until Apr 24, 2021, the artist continues to expand his collection of transformational figures with the addition of select artists from the late nineteenth century. Chief hooligans on display are J.M.W. Turner, the Impressionists as a group, and Paul Gauguin. Ghenie boldly inserts himself among the ranks of geniuses with Self-Portrait 'en plein air' (2020). The artist depicts himself seated in front of the easel somewhere on the seashore surrounded by shapes that could be interpreted as rock formations and small puddles of tide pools. We can make out Nike sneakers that anchor the painting in our time, a multi-colored bucket sun hat, brown-grey socks, a striped sailor’s shirt, shorts, or a kilt, and we can observe the figure's bare legs. The white sneakers seem to hold special significance for Ghenie – is it a timestamp that plants him in the present? They show up on a pilgrim’s feet in Rest During the Flight into Egypt (2016), and again in Self-Portrait from 2016. In Self-Portrait ‘en plein’, the artist’s head seems to be coming apart in all directions,recalling Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait VII (1953).
“It is like my revenge – my conflict, my duel. … As a kid I had a sense of admiration combined with envy. I said to myself: ‘I want to know how to do that, too.’”
The black hole of a maw opens in a scream and a yellow piece of fabric, which at this particular moment in time reminds one of a face mask, seems to be blown off with the power of the air expelled from the mouth. The painting was done in 2020 so it may very well be the artist's comment on the current crisis. The oddly shaped bony jaw is protruding from the exposed skull in the anguish and pain of a body being torn apart by an invisible inner force. The monumental painting is an open vortex of energy where abstract and representational dimensions are smashed together in an explosion of swollen phallic limbs and dry-brushed broken surfaces of thinly painted floating shapes. Every inch of the surface is activated with torn patches of impasto and dry brush gestural action. The right hand of the figure is pointing at the blue-grey painting standing on an easel in front of him – it is the only calm and conflict-free part of the work. Perhaps it is a seascape. The artist’s many fingers echo each other and form a shadow on the surface of the painting-inside-the-painting – this shadow roughly resembles an island. Is that an island of escape, is that a place of peace and forgetfulness, where surfaces are whole and calm and nothing is yet broken?
Installation view of the exhibition Hooligans at Pace, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2021.
More hooligans are included in this parade of rule-breakers. Like many other Ghenie paintings, the large canvas The Impressionists (2020) resists easy interpretation. In the whirlwind of fantastical and abstract we can make out a security camera, women's feet in dark stockings, and in the center a man’s figure that is either bending over a cart that is full of discarded bags or a photographer crouching behind a curtain of an early camera. In the statement published by Pace in conjunction with The Hooligans, Ghenie said:
When I look at the Impressionists, I have the strange feeling that I am looking at something very schizophrenic. Behind those harmless colorful landscapes there is an incredible, destructive force; camouflaged. It is an act of hooliganism. It’s hard to ask someone to see that Claude Monet’s “Impression, Soleil Levant” from 1872 is not a sweet sea landscape with a sun rising but a bomb so powerful that it could put the Greek-Roman canon to rest for good.[2]
“I have a sensibility for erosion, for surfaces that bear the marks of accident and time.”
Ghenie’s own work is just as explosive. Every painting is like a bomb that shatters conventions of time and space, where planes and figures collide in a wild symphony of color and gesture. The tussle between various elements of the painting is mirrored by the opposition between forces of representation and abstraction, which Ghenie manages to reconcile. In the interview that Michael Peppiatt recorded in an artist's studio in Berlin, Ghenie claims that his work comes from the clash between virtuosity that he acquired as a classically trained representational painter and his desire to go deeper. For him there is no distinction between abstraction and representation; for him all painting is abstract and there is no such thing as two types of painting: “It is like saying there are two gods. In the monotheistic world, you cannot say that there are two gods.”[3]
Adrian Ghenie, The Impressionists, 2020, oil on canvas, 86-5/8" × 118-1/8" (220 cm × 300 cm) © Adrian Ghenie
Another famous disruptor included in Hooligans is Turner (1775-1851). In the center of a colossal canvas, Mr. Turner (2020), we can make out a dark figure surrounded by a vortex of limbs, fire, and broken planes. In the background, there are flesh-colored mountains and fields all scratched and unified with a swirling red, white, black, and occasionally orange line. Turner was a technical virtuoso who painted in a fury of emotion, and his canvases were often violent and turbulent impressions of nature, sea, and technological wonders. In the well-known work of a fast-moving train, Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844), the audience saw little but the dust and the smoke. In an interview with Pace, Ghenie exclaims, “Turner! Oh my God! To paint a train ... When everybody was obsessed with the greatness of nature and the heroism of the past.”[4] For Ghenie, Turner was one of the key figures who changed the course of art history, and the artist's work is much like Turner’s in spirit, energy, and even technique. Although Ghenie's paintings are not as shocking to us as Turner’s was for the nineteenth-century audience, the artist's output is just as thought-provoking and hauntingly beautiful as his English predecessor’s. (maybe more on Turner?)
Installation view of the exhibition Hooligans at Pace, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2021.
Ghenie’s art draws its vital force from the moments in history that mark a rapture with the past, when the planes of reality are torn and reassembled. The key hooligans who interest Ghenie are the bold and the brave revolutionaries who led the way forward – the Impressionists, Turner, Van Gogh and Darwin, and also the ones who broke the fabric of the civilized world, such as the Mengele.
Adrian Ghenie, Mr Turner (detail), 2020, oil on canvas, 78-3/4" × 118-1/8" (200 cm × 300 cm) © Adrian Ghenie
Footnotes
[1] Pamela Kort, “Adrian Ghenie and the Cinematic Dimensions of Painting,” in Adrian Ghenie, Paintings 2014-19 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020), pp. 38-55, 45.
[2] “Adrian Ghenie,” Pace Gallery, accessed January 26, 2021, https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/adrian-ghenie-hooligans/.
[3] Michael Peppiatt, “Adrian Ghenie in Conversation with Michael Peppiatt,” in Adrian Ghenie, Paintings 2014-19 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020), pp. 81-154, 85.
[4] “Adrian Ghenie’s statement for Pace Gallery ( see note 2)