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Lot Essay
‘Ghenie’s work sparks with truth on our own experience of reality, the way a scent or a texture might be stored in the memory and how this in turn might trigger remembrances of other events, significant or not.’
–Martin Coomer
Adrian Ghenie’s painting Pie Fight Study 4, 2008, portrays a lone figure in the immediate aftermath of having had a pie thrown in his face. As if following in the tradition of William Hogarth’s ‘Modern Moral Subjects’, which infer rather than depict their pivotal and climatic moments through employing ‘Before’ and ‘After’ illustrations as a pictorial device, Ghenie leaves his viewer to decipher the high drama of this allusive and enigmatic work. Stunned into a solitary silence, the protagonist of the painting stands with his left hand instinctively raised to his brow: transfixed in time, he gestures to wipe the thick, gelatinous custard cream – or rather smeared impasto paint – from his caked face. The work stems from Ghenie’s renowned Pie Fight series, in which the artist poignantly re-envisages some of history’s most notorious figures as shamed and shameful caricatures, warranting mockery and ridicule. He explains, ‘I’m not a history painter, but I am fascinated by what happened in the twentieth century and how it continues to shape today. I don’t feel any obligation to tell this to the world, but for me the twentieth century was a century of humiliation – and through my painting, I’m still trying to understand this’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in J. Neal, ‘Referencing slapstick cinema, art history and the annals of totalitarianism, Adrian Ghenie’s paintings find ways of confronting a “century of humiliation”’, Art Review, December 2010).
Originating from his fascination with ‘episodes of history that will never be resolved,’ Ghenie compellingly paints an alternative reality where karma meets comedy, pairing fictional humour with historical tragedy to spectacular effect (N. B. Abrams, quoted in R. Wolff, ‘In the studio: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology,’ Art Info, March 2013). Begun in 2008 and returned to in 2012, the Pie Fight series 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 In the Sweet Pie and Pie, 1941, starring The Three Stooges, where the actors’ faces were smeared with custard to the point of obscurity, Ghenie simultaneously draws from the darker chapters of twentieth-century Europe, evoking infamous figures from wartorn history and then rendering them anonymous with a public ‘gunging’. Indeed, in Pie Fight Study 4, the composition has a certain filmic quality, with an atmosphere of suspense that is cultivated like a freeze-frame. The viewer is propelled into a state of heightened anticipation, eagerly awaiting the next act of the drama. As the artist has stated, ‘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 interview with S. Riolo, ‘Adrian Ghenie, Pie Eater’, Art in America, October 2010).
The surface of Pie Fight Study 4 showcases Ghenie’s tact as a painter: aptly, he has manipulated the rich impasto with a dynamic sense of energy, capturing the shock, confusion and surprise at the split-second of the pie hitting the man’s concealed and congealed face. Combining brisk and almost abstract strokes in the background with a more classical technique in his rendition of the figure, Ghenie creates an aura of surreality, heightened by the ethereal light which floods in from the left-hand side of the picture plane. ‘I work on an image in an almost classical vein: composition, figuration, use of light,’ the artist has commented; ‘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 M. Radu, ‘Adrian Ghenie: Rise & Fall,’ Flash Art, December 2009, p. 49). Merging cartoonish slapstick with a dreamlike mediation on screens and surface, Pie Fight Study 4 provides an enrapturing and unsettling vision of the shifting depths of history.
–Martin Coomer
Adrian Ghenie’s painting Pie Fight Study 4, 2008, portrays a lone figure in the immediate aftermath of having had a pie thrown in his face. As if following in the tradition of William Hogarth’s ‘Modern Moral Subjects’, which infer rather than depict their pivotal and climatic moments through employing ‘Before’ and ‘After’ illustrations as a pictorial device, Ghenie leaves his viewer to decipher the high drama of this allusive and enigmatic work. Stunned into a solitary silence, the protagonist of the painting stands with his left hand instinctively raised to his brow: transfixed in time, he gestures to wipe the thick, gelatinous custard cream – or rather smeared impasto paint – from his caked face. The work stems from Ghenie’s renowned Pie Fight series, in which the artist poignantly re-envisages some of history’s most notorious figures as shamed and shameful caricatures, warranting mockery and ridicule. He explains, ‘I’m not a history painter, but I am fascinated by what happened in the twentieth century and how it continues to shape today. I don’t feel any obligation to tell this to the world, but for me the twentieth century was a century of humiliation – and through my painting, I’m still trying to understand this’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in J. Neal, ‘Referencing slapstick cinema, art history and the annals of totalitarianism, Adrian Ghenie’s paintings find ways of confronting a “century of humiliation”’, Art Review, December 2010).
Originating from his fascination with ‘episodes of history that will never be resolved,’ Ghenie compellingly paints an alternative reality where karma meets comedy, pairing fictional humour with historical tragedy to spectacular effect (N. B. Abrams, quoted in R. Wolff, ‘In the studio: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology,’ Art Info, March 2013). Begun in 2008 and returned to in 2012, the Pie Fight series 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 In the Sweet Pie and Pie, 1941, starring The Three Stooges, where the actors’ faces were smeared with custard to the point of obscurity, Ghenie simultaneously draws from the darker chapters of twentieth-century Europe, evoking infamous figures from wartorn history and then rendering them anonymous with a public ‘gunging’. Indeed, in Pie Fight Study 4, the composition has a certain filmic quality, with an atmosphere of suspense that is cultivated like a freeze-frame. The viewer is propelled into a state of heightened anticipation, eagerly awaiting the next act of the drama. As the artist has stated, ‘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 interview with S. Riolo, ‘Adrian Ghenie, Pie Eater’, Art in America, October 2010).
The surface of Pie Fight Study 4 showcases Ghenie’s tact as a painter: aptly, he has manipulated the rich impasto with a dynamic sense of energy, capturing the shock, confusion and surprise at the split-second of the pie hitting the man’s concealed and congealed face. Combining brisk and almost abstract strokes in the background with a more classical technique in his rendition of the figure, Ghenie creates an aura of surreality, heightened by the ethereal light which floods in from the left-hand side of the picture plane. ‘I work on an image in an almost classical vein: composition, figuration, use of light,’ the artist has commented; ‘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 M. Radu, ‘Adrian Ghenie: Rise & Fall,’ Flash Art, December 2009, p. 49). Merging cartoonish slapstick with a dreamlike mediation on screens and surface, Pie Fight Study 4 provides an enrapturing and unsettling vision of the shifting depths of history.