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拍品专文
Evocative and atmospheric, Nevada Landscape is an early work that captures Adrian Ghenie’s dramatic, expressive visual idiom. Created in 2009, and held in the same private collection since the following year, it vividly demonstrates the young artist’s interrogation of the subjective nature of memory. Across the canvas smears of dark blue, forest green and coral burn brightly against a blackened ground. Using a palette knife, Ghenie builds up and scrapes back his pigments, and from these mutable swaths emerge ghostly forms. Amidst these painterly accretions, a house and sedan take shape on either side of a coiled rattlesnake. Ghenie has rendered the diamondback scales in a cloudy grey; the snake itself is poised ready to bite. Shot through with echoes of art history—from Gerhard Richter’s blurred visions to Martin Kippenberger’s neo-expressionist wit—the work captures the flourishing of the evocative painterly language that would position him at the forefront of his generation. Shortly after its creation, Ghenie mounted a major solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; more recently, he has been the subject of solo presentations at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and the Palazzo Cini, Venice, both in 2019.
Raised in Romania, Ghenie witnessed the execution of the country’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, on television in 1989. This chilling experience had a profound impact upon his view of the world: ‘I’m not trying to make my biography like I grew up in a communist dictatorship—I was just a kid, I didn’t have any trauma’, he explains. ‘But what happened in Romania after ’89—the fall of the Berlin Wall—was very interesting. When you realise a whole country can be manipulated and made to believe one thing about itself, and then the regime falls and you find out that no, it was the other way around … I saw how it is possible to manipulate a whole country. What is the truth? What is trauma?’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in A. Battaglia, ‘Every Painting is Abstract: Adrian Ghenie on his Recent Work and Evolving Sense of Self’, Artnews, 17 February 2017). He has held onto this wary regard for the media, approaching questions of truthful representation in his eerie portraits and landscapes. Citing films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, Ghenie too fabricates worlds where fact and subjectivity serve as duelling protagonists. Examples of his paintings are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Ghenie’s visual idiom is often compared to that of Francis Bacon, whose painterly distortions similarly summon ambivalent interpretations and abstracted sensations. Whereas Bacon often painted an inner and private psychology, however, Ghenie’s subjects are frequently drawn from the public eye, be they celebrated icons or nightmares of a bygone era. Not content simply to transmit historical imagery, Ghenie—who fills his tableaux with references to photographs, films, and other works of art—challenges the belief that the past is a fixed entity. Indeed, Nevada Landscape seems plucked from a dream, a half-remembered world in which objects and figures drift languidly into view before succumbing to the looming darkness. The painting’s stark light and murky tonalities encourage comparisons to footage of early atomic tests, many of which were carried out in Nevada, but by masking the source of his images, Ghenie’s interpretation of the Silver State’s history can only ever be conjecture. As the artist himself has noted, ‘I like the difference between the official story and the personal perspective’ (A. Ghenie quoted in A. Gartenfeld, ‘Adrian Ghenie’, Interview, 29 November 2011).
Raised in Romania, Ghenie witnessed the execution of the country’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, on television in 1989. This chilling experience had a profound impact upon his view of the world: ‘I’m not trying to make my biography like I grew up in a communist dictatorship—I was just a kid, I didn’t have any trauma’, he explains. ‘But what happened in Romania after ’89—the fall of the Berlin Wall—was very interesting. When you realise a whole country can be manipulated and made to believe one thing about itself, and then the regime falls and you find out that no, it was the other way around … I saw how it is possible to manipulate a whole country. What is the truth? What is trauma?’ (A. Ghenie, quoted in A. Battaglia, ‘Every Painting is Abstract: Adrian Ghenie on his Recent Work and Evolving Sense of Self’, Artnews, 17 February 2017). He has held onto this wary regard for the media, approaching questions of truthful representation in his eerie portraits and landscapes. Citing films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, Ghenie too fabricates worlds where fact and subjectivity serve as duelling protagonists. Examples of his paintings are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Ghenie’s visual idiom is often compared to that of Francis Bacon, whose painterly distortions similarly summon ambivalent interpretations and abstracted sensations. Whereas Bacon often painted an inner and private psychology, however, Ghenie’s subjects are frequently drawn from the public eye, be they celebrated icons or nightmares of a bygone era. Not content simply to transmit historical imagery, Ghenie—who fills his tableaux with references to photographs, films, and other works of art—challenges the belief that the past is a fixed entity. Indeed, Nevada Landscape seems plucked from a dream, a half-remembered world in which objects and figures drift languidly into view before succumbing to the looming darkness. The painting’s stark light and murky tonalities encourage comparisons to footage of early atomic tests, many of which were carried out in Nevada, but by masking the source of his images, Ghenie’s interpretation of the Silver State’s history can only ever be conjecture. As the artist himself has noted, ‘I like the difference between the official story and the personal perspective’ (A. Ghenie quoted in A. Gartenfeld, ‘Adrian Ghenie’, Interview, 29 November 2011).