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Lot Essay
‘We inevitably live in a post-WWII epoch, which means that we constantly have to look back to that watershed moment in order to understand our present condition’
(A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
‘[Ghenie’s work] conjures up both the rigidity of Social Realism and the terror of Francis Bacon’s pictures’
(J. Garity, Six Lines of Flight, in Frieze 153, March 2013).
‘I think consciously and unconsciously I want to master in painting what David Lynch has done in cinema. It was with Lynch that I started to build the visual language of my paintings’
(A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
‘I work on an image in an almost classical vein: composition, figuration, use of light. On the other hand, I do not refrain from resorting to all kinds of idioms, such as the surrealist principle of association or the abstract experiments which foreground texture and surface’
(A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
Stunned into silence and standing with his right hand clasped to his cheek, a solitary figure stares into the distance. Unceremoniously gunged in a pie-fight, the anonymous man’s face is caked in thick swathes of oil paint, which slip slowly down his shoulders like custard cream. Set within the plush, curtained settings of a drawing room, the man appears stunned by the onslaught - an unwilling protagonist in Ghenie’s unfolding drama. Painted with expressive brush strokes and lavish swathes of impasto paint in rich, jewel-like colours of ruby red and aquamarine, the canvas is tactile near sculptural. The composition wrestles between realism and abstraction, the amorphous figure melting into a fluid array of velvety paint, as the artist plunges his brush further, blending his medium wet-in-wet.
Painted in 2012 and exhibited in the artist’s solo show at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain (2014-2015), Pie Fight Interior (2012) is from one of the artist’s most notable series. Chosen to represent Romania at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015 his paintings pair fictional comedy with historical tragedy to spectacular effect. The artist began his Pie Fight series in 2008 and returned to it in 2012; the cycle starred in the artist’s first U.S. museum show, Pie-Fights and Pathos at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver in 2012. Making reference to the pastry wars in comedies such as The Sweet Pie and Pie, starring The Three Stooges, 1941, where the actors’ faces were smeared with custard to the point of anonymity, Ghenie also draws from the darker chapters of European twentieth century history. The artist freezes the slapstick moments and mashes them up with iconic images from Nazi history to compelling effect. The paintings blur, smear, and scrape at the faces of key historical Nazi figures like Adolf Hitler, rendering them anonymous with a public ‘gunging’ that adds insult to injury. In Pie Fight Interior, the composition has a special filmic quality, with an atmosphere of suspense that is cultivated like a freeze-frame. We wait in a state of heightened anticipation for the next act of the drama. As the artist himself has explained, ‘I think consciously and unconsciously I want to master in painting what David Lynch has done in cinema. It was with Lynch that I started to build the visual language of my paintings’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
A combination of childhood experience, archival material, and collective memory forms the basis for Ghenie’s visual reflections. In Pie Fight Interior, the figure is likely derived from a historical photographic document dating to the Nazi-era. However, the interior has been rendered nearly unidentifiable; the room’s armchair dissolves into a haphazard colour scheme, flowers in the background melt into a ghostly set of abstract lines rendered with a palette knife, while the thick curtains become a geometric pattern where colour shapes the space. In Pie Fight Interior, the viewer’s eye moves restlessly across the composition – the many drips and splatters of paint that Ghenie refers to as “staged accidents” (A. Ghenie, quoted in R. Wolff, ‘IN THE STUDIO: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology’, in Art and Auction, March 2013). Formally, the work has stylistic similarities with the great existential paintings of the twentieth centuries: Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon in particular come to mind. As art critic Jeanne Gerrity astutely observed ‘[Ghenie’s work] conjures up both the rigidity of Social Realism and the terror of Francis Bacon’s pictures’ (J. Garity, Six Lines of Flight, Frieze 153, March 2013).
Pie Fight Interior, like others in the series, grapples with the shame and pain of living under a dictatorial political regime and Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a composite German word – emerging after the nation’s de-nazification – that describes the pain and shame of coming to terms with the past. Ghenie has explained that the humiliation with which the Pie Fight series engages ‘is a very strange ritual in the human species and still one of the most important features of a dictatorship. The best way to terrorize people is to humiliate them’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in R. Wolff, ‘IN THE STUDIO: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology’, in Art and Auction, March 2013). The artist speaks from experience, as someone who spent his childhood under tyrannical Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and observed the eventual toppling of the dictator’s regime and dramatic demise on Christmas Day in 1989.
(A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
‘[Ghenie’s work] conjures up both the rigidity of Social Realism and the terror of Francis Bacon’s pictures’
(J. Garity, Six Lines of Flight, in Frieze 153, March 2013).
‘I think consciously and unconsciously I want to master in painting what David Lynch has done in cinema. It was with Lynch that I started to build the visual language of my paintings’
(A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
‘I work on an image in an almost classical vein: composition, figuration, use of light. On the other hand, I do not refrain from resorting to all kinds of idioms, such as the surrealist principle of association or the abstract experiments which foreground texture and surface’
(A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
Stunned into silence and standing with his right hand clasped to his cheek, a solitary figure stares into the distance. Unceremoniously gunged in a pie-fight, the anonymous man’s face is caked in thick swathes of oil paint, which slip slowly down his shoulders like custard cream. Set within the plush, curtained settings of a drawing room, the man appears stunned by the onslaught - an unwilling protagonist in Ghenie’s unfolding drama. Painted with expressive brush strokes and lavish swathes of impasto paint in rich, jewel-like colours of ruby red and aquamarine, the canvas is tactile near sculptural. The composition wrestles between realism and abstraction, the amorphous figure melting into a fluid array of velvety paint, as the artist plunges his brush further, blending his medium wet-in-wet.
Painted in 2012 and exhibited in the artist’s solo show at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain (2014-2015), Pie Fight Interior (2012) is from one of the artist’s most notable series. Chosen to represent Romania at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015 his paintings pair fictional comedy with historical tragedy to spectacular effect. The artist began his Pie Fight series in 2008 and returned to it in 2012; the cycle starred in the artist’s first U.S. museum show, Pie-Fights and Pathos at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver in 2012. Making reference to the pastry wars in comedies such as The Sweet Pie and Pie, starring The Three Stooges, 1941, where the actors’ faces were smeared with custard to the point of anonymity, Ghenie also draws from the darker chapters of European twentieth century history. The artist freezes the slapstick moments and mashes them up with iconic images from Nazi history to compelling effect. The paintings blur, smear, and scrape at the faces of key historical Nazi figures like Adolf Hitler, rendering them anonymous with a public ‘gunging’ that adds insult to injury. In Pie Fight Interior, the composition has a special filmic quality, with an atmosphere of suspense that is cultivated like a freeze-frame. We wait in a state of heightened anticipation for the next act of the drama. As the artist himself has explained, ‘I think consciously and unconsciously I want to master in painting what David Lynch has done in cinema. It was with Lynch that I started to build the visual language of my paintings’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in Flash Art, November-December 2009).
A combination of childhood experience, archival material, and collective memory forms the basis for Ghenie’s visual reflections. In Pie Fight Interior, the figure is likely derived from a historical photographic document dating to the Nazi-era. However, the interior has been rendered nearly unidentifiable; the room’s armchair dissolves into a haphazard colour scheme, flowers in the background melt into a ghostly set of abstract lines rendered with a palette knife, while the thick curtains become a geometric pattern where colour shapes the space. In Pie Fight Interior, the viewer’s eye moves restlessly across the composition – the many drips and splatters of paint that Ghenie refers to as “staged accidents” (A. Ghenie, quoted in R. Wolff, ‘IN THE STUDIO: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology’, in Art and Auction, March 2013). Formally, the work has stylistic similarities with the great existential paintings of the twentieth centuries: Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon in particular come to mind. As art critic Jeanne Gerrity astutely observed ‘[Ghenie’s work] conjures up both the rigidity of Social Realism and the terror of Francis Bacon’s pictures’ (J. Garity, Six Lines of Flight, Frieze 153, March 2013).
Pie Fight Interior, like others in the series, grapples with the shame and pain of living under a dictatorial political regime and Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a composite German word – emerging after the nation’s de-nazification – that describes the pain and shame of coming to terms with the past. Ghenie has explained that the humiliation with which the Pie Fight series engages ‘is a very strange ritual in the human species and still one of the most important features of a dictatorship. The best way to terrorize people is to humiliate them’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in R. Wolff, ‘IN THE STUDIO: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology’, in Art and Auction, March 2013). The artist speaks from experience, as someone who spent his childhood under tyrannical Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and observed the eventual toppling of the dictator’s regime and dramatic demise on Christmas Day in 1989.