Adrian Ghenie

Meditating on the idea of hooliganism in art, Ghenie has shared the following statement about this new body of work:

When one stays for long hours in a studio year after year - besides doubting everything - you start to ask yourself what you are looking at when you look at paintings from the past. In time you develop a habit for peeling them like onions. Twenty years ago, I saw the surface, the skill, the prettiness. Now I see the energy behind this, the violence.

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.

Looking again at these “harmless" paintings drew me deeper into the concept of hooliganism in art - the hooligan side of the artist, how crucial it is, how it manifests. The word hooliganism suggests something loud, exterior, aggressive and in your face. But in art it shows itself in the most discrete ways. Caravaggio’s pilgrims with dirty feet, for example. He was the first to paint the actual dirt on their feet. Such a small detail but it had such power, it could defy the church. Or when he chose a prostitute drowned in the Tiber as his model for the dead Virgin Mary. Or Cézanne’s bathers, for example - they are mockery of the Greek Roman and Prussian canons, but this mockery made Picasso possible. Turner! Oh my God! To paint a train ... when everybody was obsessed with the greatness of nature and the heroism of the past.

It seems that painting is in a crisis. It comes in waves or cycles. But in looking closer, it’s always hard to describe this crisis. It something we feel rather than explain. When I feel that the medium of painting is suffering a mutation or a contamination, more precisely I feel that painting is again becoming literature or journalism. Imagine going back in time and visiting a Pre Raphaelite show. You know it is literature. The medium of painting is strangled by that overdose of symbolism. Hooliganism saved painting by focusing on the medium itself, ignoring the "grand" subject matter and fighting only for the surface. It cleaned painting of literature and restored its autonomy. Even today, we consider this an act of restitution.

Was it clear then? Probably not. We never see it when it happens.

Turn your attention to landscape painting - such a minor genre for centuries but we have only to think of its attempt to impress Paris with apples and haystacks. Putting aside mythology, religion and the Greek Roman canon in these innocuous landscape paintings was in fact an act of hooliganism.

The hooligan inside the artist will not allow the soul to dry with pure intellect. It is a vital force that translates into an ability to rebel, reject, ignore or mock while staying away from ideological hate or fundamentalism. How else can I see the Impressionists or Turner, Van Gogh or Gauguin, if not as monuments to this quality?