Adrian Ghenie

After more than ten years on Potsdamer Straße, Galeria Plan B moves to one of the iconic towers on Strausberger Platz, also known as Haus Berlin. Based in the German capital since 2008, the gallery takes a leap forward and expands with new exhibition and office spaces spread across the ground and first floor of the 14-story building. Adrian Ghenie inaugurates the renovated location with a presentation of his most recent paintings, continuing his pursuit of isolating and abstracting the human condition. With this exhibition, Plan B celebrates its growth in the city, which is also home to the artist's studio.

Designed by the chief architect of East Berlin Hermann Henselmann and built during 1953-1956, Haus Berlin together with Haus des Kindes form the entrance to the Magistrale. The architectural complex, starting in Strausberger Platz and stretching down all along Karl-Marx-Allee, is on its way to become a UNESCO World Heritage-listed monument. With views to preserving the spirit of the historical building, Plan B undertook a six-month renovation to enhance the space's original character in lieu of turning it into a generic white cube.

The inaugural exhibition will feature Adrian Ghenie’s newest cycle of middle and large-sized paintings as well as charcoal drawings and preparatory studies – their central theme being what curator Mihnea Mircan describes as time-travelers. "Time travels through them, affecting their very constitution, their capacity to enunciate presence and biographical continuity. Inspired by the apprehensive stillness of pandemic lockdowns, the works depict quasi-protagonists – figures in the process of becoming grounds, their ribcages undone and reconfigured as baroque spatial enclosures. Their obstinate gesticulation, as they flail, in space and time, to signify or to make sense, is less an occasion to recompose movement as futurist elongation but to decompose their appearance as a swirl of expansions and contractions, inhalations and exhalations where nothing really begins and nothing ever ends."

Adrian Ghenie, born 1977 in Baia Mare, Romania, lives and works in Berlin.

Selected solo exhibitions: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg and Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice (2019); The Romanian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Malaga (2014); Museum for Contemporary Art, Denver (2012); S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent (2010) and The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2009).

Selected group exhibitions: Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2022); Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Tempelhof Airport, Berlin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021); Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris and Metz (2018); Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles (2016); MAK, Vienna and The Metropolitan Art Center, Belfast (2015); MoMA, San Francisco (2014); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013) and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2012).