The Squat

Spanning three metres in width, Adrian Ghenie’s The Squat (2021) is a vibrant, magisterial painting that pulsates with chromatic and textural life. It is one of a group of recent works inspired by the artist’s second hometown of Berlin. A woman smokes on a balcony, hung with a torn, illegible banner that recalls the many such hangings seen on squatted buildings in the German city. Conveyed in billowing ribbons of umber and pink, she looks out on a turbulent scene. Flurries of cyan and scarlet line electrify the dark sky, looping and flashing like some alien weather system. Zones of thick impasto are clawed with striations. Elsewhere, smooth, gleaming swathes of pink, orange and earthy colour are masked off, recalling sections of collage. The balcony railings are crisp as a cut-out, and the plastic chair behind them is marbled with a horizontal blur worthy of Gerhard Richter. Conveyed in a dazzling panoply of techniques, the picture sees Ghenie’s renowned painterly eloquence reach innovative, exuberant new heights.

Ghenie rose to prominence in the 2010s for powerful, layered and cinematic paintings that were concerned with the dark moments and pivotal figures of European history. Filtered through collations of found photographic imagery, they included reflections on the Second World War and life under communism in his native Romania, and featured the distorted countenances of Charles Darwin and Vincent van Gogh. In recent years Ghenie has evolved his style in new directions, turning his gaze towards contemporary life and imagining the future. These works often picture our interactions with smartphones, selfies and computer screens. Leaning less on photographic sources and collage studies, he develops his ideas in large-scale charcoal drawings. His figures have become more fleshy, emotive and labile, merging with the abstract bravura of their settings.

While Ghenie takes a sceptic’s view of modern technology, the information age has created an ever-more more urgent role, he believes, for the physical presence of painting. ‘Somehow,’ he says, ‘the more we go online, the more we go digital, the more we need to have this mark on the canvas made with the hand’ (A. Ghenie quoted in ‘Line and Figure: Adrian Ghenie in Conversation with Nicholas Cullinan’, in Adrian Ghenie: The Fear of Now, exh. cat. Thaddaeus Ropac, London 2022, p. 7). Ghenie’s paintings of Berlin—a cosmopolitan place of fluid borders and flourishing subcultures—see him at his most celebratory, depicting scenes of togetherness and gentle humour. They include portrayals of a long nightclub queue, a couple lounging in front of a MacBook, and a flirtatious street encounter next to one of the city’s distinctive orange trashcans.

Ghenie’s painterly ambitions increased together with this freedom in his subject matter. The Squat exemplifies the vivid sense of momentum that characterises his recent works, which are brighter, vaster and more dynamic than ever before. With a deep, photographic knowledge of art history, he draws freely upon the technical toolkits of Abstract Expressionism and Francis Bacon, while also paying homage to the Old Masters. Baroque painting is a particularly important touchstone. Ghenie admires Tintoretto for the same drama, vigour and grandeur he values in Willem de Kooning. ‘I think I’m that kind of Baroque species’, he has said. ‘… A type of painting which turns the energy and the movement of the body into the image’ (A. Ghenie in conversation with M. Peppiatt, in J. Judin (ed.), Adrian Ghenie Paintings 2014-19, Berlin 2020, pp. 119-120). Just such an image is realised in The Squat. Poised with her cigarette amid a melee of gesture and form, the woman watches over a brave new world, the winds of change rushing through the air.