Adrian Ghenie @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

Adrian Ghenie

Pace Gallery, Seoul

September 2 - October 22, 2022

Adrian Ghenie 

Self-Portrait with Paintbrush, 2022 

© Adrian Ghenie, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new works on paper by Adrian Ghenie at its newly expanded gallery in Seoul. This presentation marks Adrian Ghenie’s first solo show in Asia and coincide with the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul. Presented in the main gallery space of Pace’s Seoul arts complex, the show—spread across two floors of exhibition space— includes 28 variously sized charcoal drawings that reflect Adrian Ghenie’s experimentations in mark-making and figuration.

Adrian Ghenie, whose practice spans painting, drawing, and collage, is best known for his lush oil paintings of figures in layered, cinematic works that mine visual, political, and social histories, including those of his native Romania. Over the last five years, Ghenie has often employed the art of a particular genre or era as a starting point to develop a new body of work. He creates a kind of conflict between the story of that period and his own autobiography—this wrestling match between stories and narratives is mediated by his strokes and swathes of rich, blended color and luxurious impasto. The result is a dreamscape of visceral, distorted images layered with renditions of collaged elements and unfinished gestures.

Adrian Ghenie has now added charcoal drawing to his repertoire, and this forthcoming presentation with Pace in Seoul will be his first exhibition devoted entirely to the medium. The works in the show examine banal and sometimes grotesque figures engaged in the most typical actions of a technological society, marrying the tradition of Otto Dix and George Grosz to a contemporary vision of people obsessed with their cell phones, masked with N95s, or idly fidgeting with remote controls as they surrender to their televisions.

Beyond this handling and interpretation of the subject matter, the medium itself presents a unique challenge. The artist has devised a new process for using charcoal, almost in the manner of old master prints. He bends the dry, unforgiving charcoal to his will, achieving the liquid, sensuous imagery for which he is known.

Pace’s exhibition of Adrian Ghenie’s new body of works on paper in Seoul reflects its commitment to spotlighting its robust, international contemporary program at its expanded arts complex in the Korean capital. A Korean translation of the artist’s recent book The Hooligans—produced by Pace Publishing, the gallery’s imprint—will be available to view and purchase in the new Osulloc Tea House, which opens at the Seoul gallery complex on the occasion of the Frieze art fair in the city and will host rotating displays of prints, editions, and multiples as well as titles from Pace Publishing.

Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977, Baia Mare, Romania) adopts elements from the tradition of history painting while subverting its conventions by representing provocative subjects and undermining norms of realism. A formally trained painter, he synthesizes his technical abilities with conceptual tendencies from Dada, merging representational and abstract imagery. His practice conflates and extends painting techniques of the past, displaying both a Baroque mastery of chiaroscuro and a gestural handling of paint indebted to Abstract Expressionism. With pronounced brushwork that introduces distortions of depicted space and his subjects’ features, Adrian Ghenie’s art unearths feelings of vulnerability, frustration, and desire, invoking human experience and themes of the collective unconscious.

PACE GALLERY, SEOUL

2/3F, 267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Adrian Ghenie @ Pace Gallery, New York - The Hooligans

Adrian Ghenie: The Hooligans

Pace Gallery, New York

Through April 24, 2021

ADRIAN GHENIE

The Impressionists, 2020 

© Adrian Ghenie, courtesy Pace Gallery

The Hooligans, ADRIAN GHENIE’s fourth solo exhibition with Pace Gallery, brings together nine paintings and three drawings, all made during the last year. Influenced by Impressionist painters, as well as J.M.W. Turner, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, this new body of work continues Adrian Ghenie’s exploration of abstracting figures, layering shapes, and using gestural painting techniques to create complex images intertwined with art historical narratives. Adrian Ghenie’s meditation on the idea of “hooliganism” examines the crucial role of rebellion in an artist’s process, working to reject or ignore traditionalism to create the new.

Since the mid-2000s, Adrian Ghenie has created drawings, collages, and paintings that mine the history of art as well as the darkest chapters of Europe’s past, notably World War II and the subsequent rise of communism, including in his native Romania. Somber and gritty, his canvases bear gestural, abstract brushstrokes that build as much as mar their representational contents. Beginning in 2014, the artist began to work from assembled images. In recent years, his focus shifted to an exploration of revolutionary figures from the late 19th century such as Vincent Van Gogh and Charles Darwin, using them as points of departure more than inspiration. Adrian Ghenie’s visceral, even iconoclastic, impasto conjures distortions of memory, as well as fraught experiences that exceed and collide with official accounts of history.

Primarily portraits of nineteenth-century artists, the works on view in The Hooligans suggest a genealogy that begins with J.M.W. Turner, runs through the Impressionists, and ends with Post-Impressionist figures, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Quiet disruptors, these painters affirmed the materiality of oil paints with their loose brushstrokes, while amplifying painting’s optical qualities, namely its immersive luminosity and chromatic richness. Radicals in their time, their work unsettled the Romantic period, reflecting changes to modern vision as both bodily and subjective - a phenomenon that the nineteenth century’s new optical instruments and scientific experiments had already put underway. Adrian Ghenie, whose past work has explored the relationship between painting and cinema, continues to mine art’s ever-evolving relationship to history, vision and technology, as suggested by the presence of anachronistic details, such as sneakers and baseball caps, VR goggles and security cameras, that interrupt broad sections drawn from familiar nineteenth century paintings.

Meditating on the idea of hooliganism in art, Adrian Ghenie has shared the following statement about this new body of work:

When one stays for long hours in a studio year after year - besides doubting everything - you start to ask yourself what you are looking at when you look at paintings from the past. In time you develop a habit for peeling them like onions. Twenty years ago, I saw the surface, the skill, the prettiness. Now I see the energy behind this, the violence.

When I look at the Impressionists, I have the strange feeling that I am looking at something very schizophrenic. Behind those harmless colorful landscapes there is an incredible, destructive force; camouflaged. It is an act of hooliganism. It’s hard to ask someone to see that Claude Monet’s “Impression, soleil levant" from 1872 is not a sweet sea landscape with a sun rising but a bomb so powerful that it could put the Greek Roman canon to rest for good.

Looking again at these “harmless" paintings drew me deeper into the concept of hooliganism in art - the hooligan side of the artist, how crucial it is, how it manifests. The word hooliganism suggests something loud, exterior, aggressive and in your face. But in art it shows itself in the most discrete ways. Caravaggio’s pilgrims with dirty feet, for example. He was the first to paint the actual dirt on their feet. Such a small detail but it had such power, it could defy the church. Or when he chose a prostitute drowned in the Tiber as his model for the dead Virgin Mary. Or Cézanne’s bathers, for example - they are mockery of the Greek Roman and Prussian canons, but this mockery made Picasso possible. Turner! Oh my God! To paint a train ... when everybody was obsessed with the greatness of nature and the heroism of the past.

It seems that painting is in a crisis. It comes in waves or cycles. But in looking closer, it’s always hard to describe this crisis. It something we feel rather than explain. When I feel that the medium of painting is suffering a mutation or a contamination, more precisely I feel that painting is again becoming literature or journalism. Imagine going back in time and visiting a Pre Raphaelite show. You know it is literature. The medium of painting is strangled by that overdose of symbolism. Hooliganism saved painting by focusing on the medium itself, ignoring the "grand" subject matter and fighting only for the surface. It cleaned painting of literature and restored its autonomy. Even today, we consider this an act of restitution.

Was it clear then? Probably not. We never see it when it happens.

Turn your attention to landscape painting - such a minor genre for centuries but we have only to think of its attempt to impress Paris with apples and haystacks. Putting aside mythology, religion and the Greek Roman canon in these innocuous landscape paintings was in fact an act of hooliganism.

The hooligan inside the artist will not allow the soul to dry with pure intellect. It is a vital force that translates into an ability to rebel, reject, ignore or mock while staying away from ideological hate or fundamentalism. How else can I see the Impressionists or Turner, Van Gogh or Gauguin, if not as monuments to this quality?

This exhibition comes on the heels of two major solo museum exhibitions at The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; and Palazzo Cini, Venice, Italy in 2019.

ADRIAN GHENIE (b. 1977, Baia Mare, Romania) adopts elements from the tradition of history painting while subverting its conventions by representing provocative subjects and undermining norms of realism. A formally trained painter, he synthesizes his technical abilities with conceptual tendencies from Dada, merging representational and abstract imagery. His practice conflates and extends painting techniques of the past, displaying both a Baroque mastery of chiaroscuro and a gestural handling of paint indebted to Abstract Expressionism. With pronounced brushwork that introduces distortions of depicted space and his subjects’ features, Adrian Ghenie’s art unearths feelings of vulnerability, frustration, and desire, invoking human experience and themes of the collective unconscious.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.pacegallery.com

Dimitru Gorzo, SLAG Gallery, New York - In the Corner of My Eye - Inaugural Exhibition

Gorzo: In the Corner of My Eye

SLAG Gallery, New York

June 12 – July 19 2008

SLAG announces the opening of their new gallery at 548 West 28th Street, New York City.

SLAG will open on June 12th with the first New York exhibition of works by the Romanian artist DUMITRU GORZO.

The exhibition will include 34 of the artist’s recent paintings on carved wooden reliefs. In these works the artist has painted realistically rendered portraits of relatives and neighbors from his native village over relief sculptures of primitive characters and archetypes carved by the artist into panels of linden and fir. Two contrasting worlds are superimposed: the beautifully rendered pedestrian life of the modest, rural villagers contrasting with the wild and libidinal figures underneath. Dumitru Gorzo has returned repeatedly to the members of his village of Ieud as a subject. It is his goal to paint a portrait of every resident of his village, which is populated by more than 1,000 people.

In the Corner of My Eye evokes images created by the mind at the periphery of the visual field, images and forms that appear free from the oppression of logic and convention.

DIMITRU GORZO was born in 1975 in Ieud, Maramures, Romania. In 2006 he was the subject of a major, one-person exhibition at the Romanian National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest (Oct.-Dec. 2006). The exhibition then traveled to the Brukenthal Art Museum, Sibiu, Romania (Dec. 2006–Jan. 2007). He received a degree from the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Since 1999 he has shown extensively in Romania where his work has garnered extensive press coverage and a growing audience. His exhibitions have frequently generated controversy for their political and sexual subject matter and the artist’s unusually bold treatment of issues that are still considered quite controversial in Romania. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions in Romania, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg, his work has been included in group shows in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Romania. The artist lives and works in Bucharest.

An illustrated catalog including an essay by Marek Bartelik, art historian and critic, will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

SLAG Gallery specializes in contemporary Eastern European art and is operated by owner/director Irina Protopopescu.

SLAG GALLERY

548 West 28th Street, New York

www.slaggallery.com

Updated Post

Victor Brauner Centenary, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Victor Brauner Centenary

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

January 1 - July 31 2004

VICTOR BRAUNER

The Alchemist, 1956

Oil on canvas

The Vera and Arturo Schwarz

Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art

Courtesy Israel Museum

VICTOR BRAUNER (1903-1966), a Romanian/French artist of Jewish origin, was an early adherent of the Surrealist movement who actively explored the realm of dreams and the unconscious, and thrived on the occult and the mystical. The content and style of his art reflect a fertile fusion of wide-ranging world cultures, mythologies, and religious beliefs, from Egyptian to Aztec, Native American to Oceanic, Jewish to Hindu. Victor Brauner’s works often have a naive, folk quality, realized in boldly colored abstract shapes and decorative patterning. While focusing primarily on figuration - whether human, animal or mythological - the works create an intricate lexicon of symbolic forms. Despite Brauner's eclectic progression of styles, his art speaks in a distinctive and coherent voice, propelled by a search for a universal spirit.

Born in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Victor Brauner was exposed to a range of folkloric traditions, attending the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1921. A decade later Victor Brauner settled in Paris, where he was introduced to the Surrealists by Yves Tanguy, joining the group by 1933. Following the artist's first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre in 1934, which was not well received, Victor Brauner left Paris, returning only in 1938. Several months later he lost his left eye while trying to break up a fight between Oscar Dominguez and Estaban Frances in Dominguez's studio. Prophetically, several years earlier, Brauner began painting works featuring human figures with mutilated eyes, including a self-portrait with a bleeding eye.

At the outbreak of World War II, unable to obtain suitable painting materials, Victor Brauner improvised with candle wax and developed the encaustic technique, incising and coloring the wax, favoring organic coloring materials such as coffee or walnut. This technique proved particularly apt for articulating his esoteric visions, as seen in Woman, Mountain, and The Object Gives Life, displayed in this special exhibit. Victor Brauner focused on developing his personal style, incorporating elements from Near Eastern art, such as the flattening and heraldic figures in Oppression of the Object, Kabbala, Biblical magic and alchemy, and other mystical texts, such as Novalis in The Object Gives Life.

Special exhibit curated by Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Associate Curator, The Stella Fischbach Department of Modern Art.

THE ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il