Adrian Ghenie

Haunch of Venison, Zurich
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Zurich, Haunch of Venison, Adrian Ghenie: Shadow of a Daydream, 2007-08

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are faily accurate although the overall tonality is deeper and the skylight is lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in a muted palette of earthy tones, Adrian Ghenie’s New God’s Funeral presents the viewer with an enigmatic scene; a piece of cloth covers an altar-like structure, and the outlines of a group of soldiers look up from below. Inspired after his residency in Berlin, Ghenie created this and the other works in his 2008 show Shadow of a Daydream in which he explored the Jungian concept of the “collective unconscious”. Another underlying theme – and one that permeates Ghenie’s oeuvre – was the artist’s deep interest in 20^th century European history. Indeed, the subject for another of the paintings in the show – That Moment – was precisely the moment when Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide at his Führerbunker in Berlin in 1945. It is unresolved historical episodes like this one that particularly interest the artist, who in the present work seems to have wanted to imagine a funeral for the Nazi leader.

Sourcing his imagery from his own memory but also borrowing from books, archival material and film, Ghenie creates a dark and uncanny mythology on his canvases, in which he interweaves his personal experience with the collective memory he is so interested in. Having grown up in Communist Romania Ghenie became aware of the sometimes conflicting recollections there exist of the same event, recalling how his mother had “lived the worst period of the 20^th century, but when I asked [her] about it she said it was great because it was her youth” (Adrian Ghenie cited in Rachel Wolff, ‘In the Studio: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology’, Art + Auction, March 2013, online resource).

In New God’s Funeral the artist has used sombre tonalities, scraping the paint down to create thin layers that delicately reveal the action taking place. Ghenie’s deft use of his materials results in a composition of cinematic quality, an intriguing yet compelling exercise of his ability to imagine, or re-imagine the events that shaped our past and present existence.