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Lot Essay
'…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?' ——Vincent van Gogh
A brilliant, tempestuous fusion of art history, visionary feeling and pure painterly splendour, Lidless Eye (2016/2019) is perhaps Adrian Ghenie’s greatest tribute to his hero, Vincent van Gogh. One of a series of monumental works based on different self-images by the great Post-Impressionist, it sees Ghenie reach new heights of technique and emotion. Here, he reimagines the most foundational painting in his artistic life: van Gogh’s famous late Self-Portrait (1889, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). The close-cropped face, modelled in sweeping, marbled facets of crimson, pink, orange and umber, fills a canvas almost two metres in height. The background takes up the blue-green hues of van Gogh’s painting. One eye is glazed in turquoise, as if seen underwater: the other is a glinting black abyss, nestled among pleats of blood-flushed magenta and midnight blue. Ghenie’s mark-making ranges from soft, vaporous blooms to sculptural, palette-knifed sweeps of thick impasto. Dry-brushed skeins of upward motion recall van Gogh’s distinctive swirling arabesques; whiplash scribbles cut through sharp, red-rimmed planes of masked-off paint, which almost appear like collage. Delicate freckles and blushes meet more visceral tones of bleeding and bruising, as if laying bare the subject from inside and out. In this scape of blazing colour and dynamic texture, Ghenie both celebrates van Gogh and stages something of a self-portrait. His own dark eye through history stares out from the heart of the picture.
Vincent van Gogh has been an inspiration to Ghenie since his childhood. With little exposure to art at home in Baia Mare, Romania, he was captivated as a boy by the story of ‘The Tragic Life of Vincent van Gogh’ in a local art magazine, which included a black-and-white image of one of the artist’s self-portraits. He kept the magazine cover, depicting one of van Gogh’s Sunflowers, under his pillow like a talisman. It was much later, on a visit to Paris during his first trip to the West in 1998, that he saw in person the Musée d’Orsay self-portrait—one of the last van Gogh painted before his death. This face-to-face encounter had an intense impact on Ghenie’s body and soul. ‘It was the only time in my life I was truly physically sick’, he recalls (A. Ghenie in conversation with T. Van Laere, Adrian Ghenie, exh. cat. Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp 2014, n.p.). Van Gogh’s countenance, wrought with internal tumult, went on to become a touchstone for the intertwined expression of art history, European conflict and personal biography that defines Ghenie’s practice. Between 2012 and 2014, he painted a number of small-scale versions of his own portrait as van Gogh. Later, larger works such as the present see him revisit the theme with greater ambition and painterly freedom than ever before, plunging the viewer into a visage as vast as a landscape. The eye remains at the painting’s core, a vortex compelling in its emptiness. ‘That eye for me is one of the coldest places in art history’, Ghenie has said. ‘In most of my van Gogh heads, the eye is removed and it is a black hole’ (A. Ghenie in conversation with M. Gnyp, Zoo Magazine, No. 57, 2017).
Ghenie’s discussion of his favourite paintings as ‘cold’ or ‘hot’ frames them in terms of somatic, sensual experience. While much of his practice is fuelled by pictures seen in reproduction—printed out, found in the pages of books, or viewed through a screen online—his meeting with van Gogh in the Musée d’Orsay reaffirmed for him this physical aspect of painting’s power. Lidless Eye restages the gut-punch of that moment: an instant of self-realisation for Ghenie as he witnessed van Gogh’s own cold look in the mirror. The grand scale and energy of its execution, meanwhile, imbues Ghenie’s painting with a bodily life of its own. He is an admirer of Baroque painters like Tintoretto, whose vast works display a magisterial command of billowing movement, drama and figures in space. While working from a preparatory collage—and also welcoming the ‘Russian roulette’ of accident and impulse—Ghenie here performs a similar choreography. ‘At one moment you get into a kind of trance,’ he says, ‘as if you’re dancing, like a dervish … I prefer getting into this whirling motion and then I don’t come out of it for about two months. I don’t paint with a brush, I paint with a whole load of tools’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in L. Vasiliu, ‘Adrian Ghenie: My Method Is Managing Failure’, Scena 9, 14 May 2016).
Beyond Tintoretto and beyond van Gogh himself, Ghenie’s approach draws upon a wide legacy of 20th century abstract painting. The present work invokes the fleshy, muscular brushwork of Willem de Kooning, as well as Gerhard Richter’s dragged, fissured passages of oil paint. Ghenie has described lifting ideas from painters as diverse as Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst, whose decalcomania technique he takes up in the sectional masking and marbling of his works. The tradition behind him, he says, is like a shelf of ready-made ‘abstract painting tools’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in ibid.). By splicing, remixing and deconstructing different modes of expression—abstract and figurative, painting and photograph alike—Ghenie lays bare the various artificial lenses through which we see our present, as well as those which overlay our past. His paintings are animated by the slippages between mediated, manipulated imagery and the visceral, abstract reality of pigment. Together, these elements form what he has called ‘the texture of history.’
Ghenie’s homage to van Gogh also enfolds a tribute to his other great artistic hero: the post-war British master Francis Bacon. Both renowned for their vivid, gestural and contorted brushwork, Ghenie and Bacon are similarly inspired by figures who have shaped the light and darkness of history, from the Popes of old to notorious 20th century war criminals. They share a distinct interest in the photographic image, and in how pictures structure our lived experience. Both, too, are captivated by art history, from Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Velázquez to the Abstract Expressionists. In a 2016-2017 edition of collages related to the present work, Ghenie overlaid a cropped print of van Gogh’s image with cut-out swatches of monkey fur, fish-scales, surgical mesh and human hair and skin, like a head by Arcimboldo: his process bears close comparison with Bacon’s renowned use of photographic source imagery, which included medical textbooks, as well as volumes on primates and African wildlife.
Bacon created his own version of a van Gogh self-portrait in Homage to Van Gogh (1960, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden). In the late 1950s he also made a series of works based on van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888), which Ghenie, in turn, has reprised. The 1888 original is long lost: it was destroyed, or possibly looted, during the 1945 Allied bombings of Magdeburg, Germany, where it was held in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. The absent work is therefore only known in reproduction, and through its afterlife—several times removed from its former self—in Bacon and Ghenie’s paintings. Such histories, haunted by what might have been, are important to Ghenie’s special interest in van Gogh. In the 1930s, works by van Gogh were seized as ‘Degenerate Art’, or Entartete Kunst, during the Nazis’ despotic campaign to purge modern art from Germany. Although van Gogh lived in an earlier era, his paintings thus have a place in the dark 20th century events which fascinate Ghenie, who himself grew up under the iron rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Other paintings from the same series as Lidless Eye feature ‘Degenerate Art’ ironically in their titles. If the present work exults in the vital life-force of painting, it is also distorted and in flux, with danger and uncertainty simmering below the skin.
'I realised that [van Gogh] is not looking out at us, but is looking at himself in a mirror … you rarely have this cold, lucid eye that, in a glimpse of a second, makes you realise that you saw yourself.'——Adrian Ghenie
The title Lidless Eye recurs across many of Ghenie’s pictures of van Gogh. While it evokes the piercing stare that struck Ghenie so forcefully, the phrase itself has a fantastical origin: it is a name used to refer to Sauron, the Dark Lord and title character of J. R. R. Tolkien’s iconic novels The Lord of the Rings. An incarnation of evil will, his physical form is never directly described, but he is associated with the image of a disembodied, all-seeing eye. ‘The Eye was rimmed with fire,’ Tolkien writes, ‘but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing’ (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, London 1954, p. 364). The dark void in Ghenie’s vision of van Gogh, itself a ‘window into nothing’, likewise presents a confounding lack of answers. With their jostling of different ways of seeing, his paintings embody the ambiguity and instability of our postmodern world of images. Through his own unsleeping vigilance, however, Ghenie sees beneath the surface of things. Ultimately, he arrives at a truth as clear as van Gogh’s eternal gaze: it is through painting that we might hope to bear witness to our time, and to ourselves.
A brilliant, tempestuous fusion of art history, visionary feeling and pure painterly splendour, Lidless Eye (2016/2019) is perhaps Adrian Ghenie’s greatest tribute to his hero, Vincent van Gogh. One of a series of monumental works based on different self-images by the great Post-Impressionist, it sees Ghenie reach new heights of technique and emotion. Here, he reimagines the most foundational painting in his artistic life: van Gogh’s famous late Self-Portrait (1889, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). The close-cropped face, modelled in sweeping, marbled facets of crimson, pink, orange and umber, fills a canvas almost two metres in height. The background takes up the blue-green hues of van Gogh’s painting. One eye is glazed in turquoise, as if seen underwater: the other is a glinting black abyss, nestled among pleats of blood-flushed magenta and midnight blue. Ghenie’s mark-making ranges from soft, vaporous blooms to sculptural, palette-knifed sweeps of thick impasto. Dry-brushed skeins of upward motion recall van Gogh’s distinctive swirling arabesques; whiplash scribbles cut through sharp, red-rimmed planes of masked-off paint, which almost appear like collage. Delicate freckles and blushes meet more visceral tones of bleeding and bruising, as if laying bare the subject from inside and out. In this scape of blazing colour and dynamic texture, Ghenie both celebrates van Gogh and stages something of a self-portrait. His own dark eye through history stares out from the heart of the picture.
Vincent van Gogh has been an inspiration to Ghenie since his childhood. With little exposure to art at home in Baia Mare, Romania, he was captivated as a boy by the story of ‘The Tragic Life of Vincent van Gogh’ in a local art magazine, which included a black-and-white image of one of the artist’s self-portraits. He kept the magazine cover, depicting one of van Gogh’s Sunflowers, under his pillow like a talisman. It was much later, on a visit to Paris during his first trip to the West in 1998, that he saw in person the Musée d’Orsay self-portrait—one of the last van Gogh painted before his death. This face-to-face encounter had an intense impact on Ghenie’s body and soul. ‘It was the only time in my life I was truly physically sick’, he recalls (A. Ghenie in conversation with T. Van Laere, Adrian Ghenie, exh. cat. Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp 2014, n.p.). Van Gogh’s countenance, wrought with internal tumult, went on to become a touchstone for the intertwined expression of art history, European conflict and personal biography that defines Ghenie’s practice. Between 2012 and 2014, he painted a number of small-scale versions of his own portrait as van Gogh. Later, larger works such as the present see him revisit the theme with greater ambition and painterly freedom than ever before, plunging the viewer into a visage as vast as a landscape. The eye remains at the painting’s core, a vortex compelling in its emptiness. ‘That eye for me is one of the coldest places in art history’, Ghenie has said. ‘In most of my van Gogh heads, the eye is removed and it is a black hole’ (A. Ghenie in conversation with M. Gnyp, Zoo Magazine, No. 57, 2017).
Ghenie’s discussion of his favourite paintings as ‘cold’ or ‘hot’ frames them in terms of somatic, sensual experience. While much of his practice is fuelled by pictures seen in reproduction—printed out, found in the pages of books, or viewed through a screen online—his meeting with van Gogh in the Musée d’Orsay reaffirmed for him this physical aspect of painting’s power. Lidless Eye restages the gut-punch of that moment: an instant of self-realisation for Ghenie as he witnessed van Gogh’s own cold look in the mirror. The grand scale and energy of its execution, meanwhile, imbues Ghenie’s painting with a bodily life of its own. He is an admirer of Baroque painters like Tintoretto, whose vast works display a magisterial command of billowing movement, drama and figures in space. While working from a preparatory collage—and also welcoming the ‘Russian roulette’ of accident and impulse—Ghenie here performs a similar choreography. ‘At one moment you get into a kind of trance,’ he says, ‘as if you’re dancing, like a dervish … I prefer getting into this whirling motion and then I don’t come out of it for about two months. I don’t paint with a brush, I paint with a whole load of tools’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in L. Vasiliu, ‘Adrian Ghenie: My Method Is Managing Failure’, Scena 9, 14 May 2016).
Beyond Tintoretto and beyond van Gogh himself, Ghenie’s approach draws upon a wide legacy of 20th century abstract painting. The present work invokes the fleshy, muscular brushwork of Willem de Kooning, as well as Gerhard Richter’s dragged, fissured passages of oil paint. Ghenie has described lifting ideas from painters as diverse as Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst, whose decalcomania technique he takes up in the sectional masking and marbling of his works. The tradition behind him, he says, is like a shelf of ready-made ‘abstract painting tools’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in ibid.). By splicing, remixing and deconstructing different modes of expression—abstract and figurative, painting and photograph alike—Ghenie lays bare the various artificial lenses through which we see our present, as well as those which overlay our past. His paintings are animated by the slippages between mediated, manipulated imagery and the visceral, abstract reality of pigment. Together, these elements form what he has called ‘the texture of history.’
Ghenie’s homage to van Gogh also enfolds a tribute to his other great artistic hero: the post-war British master Francis Bacon. Both renowned for their vivid, gestural and contorted brushwork, Ghenie and Bacon are similarly inspired by figures who have shaped the light and darkness of history, from the Popes of old to notorious 20th century war criminals. They share a distinct interest in the photographic image, and in how pictures structure our lived experience. Both, too, are captivated by art history, from Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Velázquez to the Abstract Expressionists. In a 2016-2017 edition of collages related to the present work, Ghenie overlaid a cropped print of van Gogh’s image with cut-out swatches of monkey fur, fish-scales, surgical mesh and human hair and skin, like a head by Arcimboldo: his process bears close comparison with Bacon’s renowned use of photographic source imagery, which included medical textbooks, as well as volumes on primates and African wildlife.
Bacon created his own version of a van Gogh self-portrait in Homage to Van Gogh (1960, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden). In the late 1950s he also made a series of works based on van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888), which Ghenie, in turn, has reprised. The 1888 original is long lost: it was destroyed, or possibly looted, during the 1945 Allied bombings of Magdeburg, Germany, where it was held in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. The absent work is therefore only known in reproduction, and through its afterlife—several times removed from its former self—in Bacon and Ghenie’s paintings. Such histories, haunted by what might have been, are important to Ghenie’s special interest in van Gogh. In the 1930s, works by van Gogh were seized as ‘Degenerate Art’, or Entartete Kunst, during the Nazis’ despotic campaign to purge modern art from Germany. Although van Gogh lived in an earlier era, his paintings thus have a place in the dark 20th century events which fascinate Ghenie, who himself grew up under the iron rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Other paintings from the same series as Lidless Eye feature ‘Degenerate Art’ ironically in their titles. If the present work exults in the vital life-force of painting, it is also distorted and in flux, with danger and uncertainty simmering below the skin.
'I realised that [van Gogh] is not looking out at us, but is looking at himself in a mirror … you rarely have this cold, lucid eye that, in a glimpse of a second, makes you realise that you saw yourself.'——Adrian Ghenie
The title Lidless Eye recurs across many of Ghenie’s pictures of van Gogh. While it evokes the piercing stare that struck Ghenie so forcefully, the phrase itself has a fantastical origin: it is a name used to refer to Sauron, the Dark Lord and title character of J. R. R. Tolkien’s iconic novels The Lord of the Rings. An incarnation of evil will, his physical form is never directly described, but he is associated with the image of a disembodied, all-seeing eye. ‘The Eye was rimmed with fire,’ Tolkien writes, ‘but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing’ (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, London 1954, p. 364). The dark void in Ghenie’s vision of van Gogh, itself a ‘window into nothing’, likewise presents a confounding lack of answers. With their jostling of different ways of seeing, his paintings embody the ambiguity and instability of our postmodern world of images. Through his own unsleeping vigilance, however, Ghenie sees beneath the surface of things. Ultimately, he arrives at a truth as clear as van Gogh’s eternal gaze: it is through painting that we might hope to bear witness to our time, and to ourselves.