Adrian Ghenie (ESSAY)
Adrian Ghenie
Art captures the minds of millions with what it displays and tells us about ourselves, but something humans are often drawn towards is the macabre, the unnatural, and the uncanny; a feeling that is well provided in Adrian Ghenie’s paintings. Ghenie was born in 1977, in Baia Mare, Romania. His father was a member of the secret police in Romania, an organization that robbed Romanian citizens of privacy and kept extensive records on the personal lives of individuals. When his father lost his job he began to wither away mentally and his family found themselves in a place of crisis. These chaotic memories ended up being a place to turn to when Ghenie was struggling as an artist.
Nowadays his work is featured in many museums and galleries across the world, such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Hammer Museum. Ghenie’s paintings are often defaced or disfigured images of people, objects, or famous paintings made to look eerie to those who view them. He combines his own trauma with the collective trauma society has faced from the horrifying events humanity has gone through in the past few hundred years. He uses historical imagery from films, memories, past artists, and people to create images that are truly haunting and unnervingly human. This is what piqued my interest in his work. I am a lover of the dark and the macabre, I live for twisted and haunting imagery and he perfects it with unique beauty. His deconstructed work of famous paintings is something that deeply fascinates me. I love the way he takes something so well known and makes it feel so different and decayed.
His famous painting “The Sunflowers in 1937” takes inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of sunflowers and corrupts it to represent the destruction of “degenerate art” in the Nazi regime. In the painting the sunflowers look like they are aflame and twisting into black smoke, which seems to be a symbol of their destruction.
“The sunflowers in 1937” sold for $4.5 million during an auction. Ghenie is known for taking 20th-21st century events and making them into paintings much like “The sunflowers in 1937”. Through the months of May to July, Ghenie exhibited his new series “We Had Everything Before Us”, displaying a more modern but still decaying look on us as human beings. His work in this series draws on the changing world around us, one painting in particular caught my eye as it was questioning the role of gender and how we determine it. “Feeling Odd” is an unsettling painting that depicts a figure with a missing face and body made out of shapes and tubes that don’t seem to align, but the shoes are extremely clear on the person’s feet. Another one of his pieces that caught my attention in this series was “The Squat”, a painting of a young woman smoking outside a squatted building. With this Ghenie was showing the rebelliousness and strength of the young but the sad reality of the struggle with economical issues to come for the young, something I’ve been feeling very personally lately.
(The squat 2021)
To create the effects in his work that he does, Ghenie uses palette knives to paint with rather than a brush. This allows him to make long sweeping strokes and let the paint guide him to where it should be. He uses knives and pencils to blur the images and create a smoky or opaque look to some colours and figures. His study and focus in painting tends to those who had a huge historical impact but were mentally ill and/or dangerous. When he creates portraits of these figures he represents their illness by deconstructing the head into a series of shapes and colours to show the mind of the figure forming on the outside of the body. It is uncomfortable and eerie for viewers to look at but highly effective. His work feels deeply personal, as if someone is telling you their past through visuals but you can’t quite discern what it means.
For me, art is a way to deal with the words you can’t say to other people, the dark parts of you that you don’t know how to express. I’ve never really been interested in art that doesn’t show some sort of raw emotion, a portrait, a landscape, a painting of an animal may be beautiful but it is not impactful for me. I am moved by things that feel like someone has shared a painful secret with me. Ghenie’s work struck me because I felt like I was being told something about him that was so unique and personal to him that I would never share it with another person, which is what I want to create with my paintings. It's a sense of understanding between the painter and the perceiver, for a brief moment you feel each other and all the raw emotions of being human before letting go and walking away from the piece back into our distracted lives.
Citations:
. "Adrian Ghenie, painter: 'You cannot paint this with a brush. It's simply the result of an accident'". The Independent.
https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/adrian-ghenie
https://www.galeriejudin.com/2021-adrian-ghenie-we-had-everything-before-us/
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