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Thursday 6 February

Adrian Ghenie: The Hacker of Classical Painting

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s time to talk about Adrian Ghenie, born in 1977 in Baia Mare, Romania, the painter who has you drooling ever since the art market made him its latest speculative toy. But stop counting the zeros, and let’s take a closer look at what lies behind this remarkable artist.

In his 200-square-meter Berlin studio, Ghenie manipulates paint like Nietzsche wielded a hammer, shattering our certainties about art history with jubilant violence. His technique? He paints without brushes, favoring palette knives and stencils, as if to say tradition can go get dressed. It’s as if Jackson Pollock decided to have a child with Francis Bacon in a Romanian basement while Van Gogh watched through the window.

Let’s talk about his relationship with history—not the sanitized textbook version, but the one that reeks of flesh and blood. Ghenie dialogues with the ghosts of the 20th century like no one else. He summons them onto his canvases in a macabre dance where Hitler mingles with Van Gogh, and Darwin appears disfigured like a Francis Bacon figure after a bender. This is where his first great strength lies: his ability to make history not a dusty museum but a contemporary battlefield where historical figures are battered, tortured, and reinvented.

This approach echoes Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on history. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin spoke of the need to “brush history against the grain”. Ghenie does exactly that, scratching the smooth surface of our historical narratives to reveal their gaping wounds. When he paints The Sunflowers in 1937, it’s not a simple homage to Van Gogh—it’s a visceral reflection on how beauty can coexist with horror. The sunflowers are no longer just flowers; they become silent witnesses to an era when “degenerate” art was destined for flames.

Collectors snatch up his paintings like vultures on fresh carrion, but what they’re buying goes far beyond a mere financial investment. Each of Ghenie’s paintings is a conceptual time bomb, ready to explode in their sterile penthouses. Take Pie Fight Interior 12: it’s not just a simple scene of a cream-pie battle; it’s a biting metaphor for our age, where violence hides behind entertainment.

His technique is brutal yet precise, like a boxer who knows exactly where to hit to hurt. He uses palette knives like scalpels, dissecting the surface of his canvases to extract a truth that isn’t always pleasant to look at. The colors fight on the canvas like gladiators in an arena, creating compositions that are both chaotic and perfectly controlled. It’s Jackson Pollock taking military strategy classes.

In his series on Van Gogh, Ghenie doesn’t just cite the master; he literally cannibalizes him. He takes the icons of art history and runs them through his mental grinder, transforming them into something new and profoundly unsettling. His Van Gogh isn’t the one from postcards and coffee mugs; it’s a tortured specter haunting our collective consciousness, a reminder that genius and madness are often two sides of the same coin.

The influence of Francis Bacon is evident in his work, but Ghenie isn’t just a mere imitator. He takes Bacon’s visceral violence and pushes it even further, creating figures that seem to dissolve before our eyes like flesh in acid. His portraits aren’t representations; they’re live psychological autopsies. He doesn’t paint faces—he paints what lies behind them, the inner demons that inhabit us all.

His Dada Room series is a perfect example of his ability to transform history into something alive and dangerous. By recreating the atmosphere of the First International Dada Fair in Berlin, he doesn’t engage in historical reenactment—he resurrects the spirit of revolt and anarchy that fueled the Dada movement. It’s as if the ghosts of Hugo Ball and Marcel Duchamp decided to throw a party in his studio, with Francis Bacon as the DJ.

In his most recent works, Ghenie attacks our digital age with the same ferocity he applied to the demons of the past. His figures are now hunched over their phones and laptops, connected to their screens by cords resembling alien tentacles. He transforms our contemporary posture—perpetually looking down at our screens—into a new form of perverse prayer, a devotion to digital gods slowly consuming us.

His series of Marilyn Monroe portraits, based on Warhol’s silkscreens, is another example of his ability to reinvent icons. He takes the most reproduced image in pop art history and turns it into something monstrous and fascinating. His Marilyns are no longer symbols of glamour but mutant creatures that look like they’ve stepped out of a particularly dark episode of Rick and Morty. It’s his way of telling us that even our most sacred icons aren’t safe from his corrosive gaze.

Ghenie’s strength lies in creating images that are both seductive and repulsive. His paintings are like car crashes you can’t look away from. There’s a perverse beauty in his way of tormenting the paint, making it flow, scrape, and bleed until it reveals something deeply true about the human condition. He isn’t searching for conventional beauty; he’s searching for truth, even if it has to be ripped from the canvas by force.

In The Fear of NOW, his recent exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, he pushes his reflections on our digital age even further. Human figures are transformed into tubular monsters, their bodies distorted by their toxic relationship with technology. A man in a Nike tracksuit and Adidas sneakers is fused with his laptop in a nightmarish symbiosis. It’s Cronenberg meets Black Mirror, with a touch of Francis Bacon for good measure.

The artist himself admits to a complicated, near-phobic relationship with technology. This anxiety seeps into every brushstroke, every deformation. He captures our collective dependence on screens with surgical precision, transforming our daily postures into tableaux of existential horror. Our perpetually bowed heads become studies in voluntary submission, still lifes of the modern soul.

His technique is evolving too. While he previously relied primarily on palette knives and stencils, he now incorporates charcoal into his creative process. This medium allows him to construct and erase his images like clearing a browser history, creating works that seem always in transition, never fully fixed. This is especially evident in his recent Marilyn Monroe portraits, where the iconic face dissolves into a maelstrom of lines and smudges.

The irony is that this artist, who so fears technology, has become one of the most insightful commentators on our digital age. His paintings perfectly capture the paradox of our time: the more digitally connected we are, the more we seem to dissolve physically. The bodies in his recent works are like corrupted data, damaged files desperately trying to maintain a human form.

What’s fascinating is that despite all this pictorial violence, his works retain a strange poetry. Even in his most nightmarish paintings, there are moments of pure grace, passages where the paint transcends its material to become raw emotion. It’s as if Ghenie is telling us that even in the darkest hours of history, even in our dystopian present, beauty always finds a way to survive.

His commercial success might make some think he’s softened, that he’s found a formula and is sticking to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each new exhibition shows an artist who continues to take risks, to push the limits of what painting can express. His recent installations in the Madonna della Mazza church in Palermo, where he placed a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit on the cross, prove he hasn’t lost his ability to provoke and make us think.

So yes, you can keep marveling at the prices his works fetch at auctions, but you’ll miss the point. Ghenie is far more than a juicy investment for collectors hungry for thrills. He’s an artist who understands that painting must be a shattered mirror reflecting the fragments of our fractured humanity. He doesn’t seek to comfort us with pretty pictures; he prefers to confront us with our demons, whether historical or contemporary.

Ghenie’s painting is like a computer virus infiltrating our collective consciousness, corrupting our certainties and illusions of safety. His works are visual Trojan horses that, under the guise of formal beauty, introduce disturbing questions into our minds about our relationship with history, technology, and our own humanity. And if some critics accuse him of being facile or unsubtle, they’ve missed the point entirely. Subtlety is a luxury we can no longer afford in an age where reality outstrips fiction in absurdity.

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