Adrian Ghenie (Romania/Germany): Works. Part II Adrian Ghenie’s paintings are never furtive documentations of reality but complex constructions that require lengthy decodification on the part of the observer. Catalogues, history books, stills from films or images from archives and databases on the internet are the various sources from which the artist draws his models, which are subsequently assembled and juxtaposed. One of his most distinctive traits is the modified representation of celebrated figures of great dictatorships of the 20th century. These figures are recovered only to be denied, through the pictorial elaboration, the historical authority they have acquired in the collective imagination. He takes as a model, for example, photographs of Adolf Hitler and his companion Eva Braun in the summer residence of Berghof, images of Doctor Josef Mengele or the father of the atomic bomb Julius Robert Oppenheimer. The artist cancels the features of the faces and focuses our attention on the appearance of the interiors in which the figures are located, pursuing a strategy of “visual subtraction” that often renders the original images almost unrecognizable. Often Ghenie’s works involve a direct clash between what appears on the surface and an implicit meaning when the visual dimension is accompanied by a knowledge of the subject. As the artist himself says, the images documenting our past are often lacking in clarity and materialness due to techniques of visual reproduction like the drawing or the photograph that produce a flat, two-dimensional picture. Ghenie’s pictorial virtuosity in realism is overcome apparently in a destructive act, arriving at a paradoxical “denied expression” directed at the creation of allegories of inner states, metaphors of fading certainties.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 12:30:00 +0000
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