Adrian Ghenie

With this exhi­bi­tion of new paint­ings, Adrian Ghenie and Juerg Judin look back on 15 years of collab­o­ra­tion. It began in 2006 with the now leg­endary group exhi­bi­tion The Cluj Connec­tion, fol­lowed by a solo exhi­bi­tion within a year—Ghenie’s first appear­ance on the interna­tional scene. Since then, he has become one of the most successful painters of his gen­er­a­tion—the first gen­er­a­tion to grow up in the new age of the inter­net. Ghenie’s response to this unprece­dented flood of informa­tion, images and the technical “any­thing goes” was (and remains), his focus on the tra­di­tional, almost reac­tion­ary medium of paint­ing. What dis­tin­guishes him from other fig­u­ra­tive painters of his peer group is his profound under­stand­ing of art history, that never exhausted itself in cita­tion, and an increas­ingly virtu­oso play with differ­ent stages of rec­og­niz­abil­ity.

Much has been written about Ghenie’s exam­ina­tion of the famous and the noto­ri­ous of history who either led the way to the great evo­lu­tions of the 20th century (Charles Darwin, Vin­cent Van Gogh)—or were respon­si­ble for its great catas­tro­phes (Hitler, Lenin). Their icono­graphic faces reg­u­larly merge with his own fea­tures in brilliant self-por­traits. Now, in the ten paint­ings of the exhi­bi­tion We Had Every­thing Before Us, all completed in the spring of 2021, Ghenie for the first time turns to his friends, neighbors and the buoy­ant pre-pan­demic scenes of his home, Berlin. As the exhi­bi­tion title sug­gests, the focus lies on the com­ing of age and the ensu­ing “lack of history”. It is about the moment when life is thought of exclu­sively in the pre­sent and future tense and the past tense seems a long way off.

With this se­ries of works, the artist has cre­ated a panorama of his Berlin, that cosmopoli­tan city where, despite increas­ing gen­trifica­tion, many sub­cul­tures flour­ish and bor­ders are more fluid than else­where. Ghenie, more an observer in the background than part of a scene, has transformed encounters with its expo­nents into paint­ings—or to be more precise: he has tried to transfer the mem­ory of the feel­ing that had resulted from such encounters onto the canvas. He uses the verb “to download” for this pro­cess. Ghenie has repeat­edly referred to the human body as a landscape, and never has this been more comprehensi­ble than in these paint­ings. We rec­og­nize volu­mi­nous, amorphous and some­times tubu­lar bod­ies that inter­twine or dis­integrate. The anchors of these body con­structs are usu­ally strikingly fash­ion­able shoes, which give the por­trayed—in lieu of the miss­ing faces—a per­son­al­ity and an assignabil­ity. In Feel­ing Odd, Ghenie has piled up shapes to form a body, rem­i­nis­cent of Gior­gio de Chirico’s meta­phys­ical com­po­si­tions. Like de Chirico, Ghenie draws from mem­o­ries to cre­ate a sense of dis­loca­tion in time and space. He offers clues rather than solu­tions. It’s an iconog­ra­phy that calls into ques­tion tra­di­tional ways to ascertain gen­der. The same is true for The Three Graces, in which gen­der flu­id­ity levers out Canova’s trin­ity of beauty, fem­i­nin­ity and moral­ity.

Ghenie not only takes up the actual transforma­tion—nat­u­ral or sur­g­ical—of one’s own body, but also the interroga­tion and transforma­tion of the photographed, dig­ital self. In The Selfie, the face lit­er­ally dis­solves in the typ­ically ner­vous search for the per­fect photo­graphic angle. The background-free The Teenager, awak­ens pre-smart­phone mem­o­ries of blind­ing flashes in photo booths and the inevitable dis­ap­point­ment with the result. Self-Por­trait with Paintbrush then combines intro­spec­tion and the per­cep­tion of oth­ers to cre­ate an almost pris­matic rep­re­senta­tion of per­son­al­ity.

All this notwith­stand­ing, Ghenie’s group of works also embraces the light-hearted and gregar­i­ous moments of grow­ing up. The Flirt, tells of a sparking chance encounter on a Berlin street cor­ner, utterly dis­arm­ing despite the scream­ing orange rubbish bin—a Berlin landmark. Hang­ing shows a cou­ple, per­haps after a long night out, in tight embrace in front of a laptop, bathed in the warm light of the ris­ing sun. In Home Alone we encounter the lonely counterpart, binge-watch­ing in front of the flick­er­ing screen—the mesmeric pull of Netflix and any number of other sites trawled unceas­ingly as lockdown enforces pro­longed per­i­ods of iso­la­tion. The Queue depicts a sit­u­a­tion all too famil­iar in Berlin’s crowded clubs: wait­ing out­side the toi­lets for a cubicle—the only space for a brief retreat. The flip side of Berlin’s increas­ing pop­u­lar­ity as a party des­tina­tion, while also attract­ing a grow­ing mid­dle class, is won­derfully dis­tilled in The Squat. A young woman is smoking on the balcony of a squ­at­ted build­ing. The once so carefree ide­al­ism and activism of Berlin’s youth, never bro­ken by the author­i­ties, has lost its fight against the power of real-estate devel­op­ers. Long dark winters have done the rest—tear­ing into the com­bat­ive banner.

In these paint­ings, Ghenie embraces the Com­ing of Age of both the indi­vid­u­als that he encounters and the city he lives in. To real­ize this he has cre­ated a stylis­tics of tran­si­tion to interpret this pro­cess of adapta­tion, tran­si­tion and conver­sion by lay­er­ing and mixing painterly and graphic ele­ments. The drafts­man­ship Ghenie achieves by using a fine brush, lends the com­po­si­tions a surpris­ing ten­der­ness and fragility. This helps to cap­ture that instance of uncertainty and the the new course set towards transforma­tion. It’s a moment when every­thing seems pos­si­ble, which is alluded to in the title of the exhi­bi­tion—with recourse to the famous first sen­tence of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of fool­ish­ness, [...] we had every­thing before us, we had noth­ing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way [...]”.