Adrian Ghenie

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles
Private Collection, United States
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although it fails to fully convey the texture of the impasto visible in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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A rich and brilliant composition of gestural magnitude, Adrian Ghenie’s Pie Fight Study 5 enraptures the viewer with its aggressive yet playful nature. Dense layers of pink and turquoise paint transform the background into an embellished and abstract realm that has been created using a combination of working with a brush as well as scraping with a palette knife. The subjects face is completely obscured by large patches of impasto paint, leaving all that remains to be seen of his identity a suit and tie. The result is an image that hovers somewhere in the vast gap between photo realism and abstract expressionism. The distorted and discomforting reality of this work is firmly grounded in that of our own, the figure acting as an anchor that provides an examination of the viewers own surrounds. Born in 1977 in Baia-Mare, Romania, Ghenie grew up in a politically charged, communist country that experienced a series of traumatising events under the regime of its repressive leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. As such, his oeuvre typically carries a deep fascination with the past and especially with figures associated with some of the most historically significant periods of the 20^th century. Hitler, Stalin and Charles Darwin, amongst others, find their way into his paintings, their features often distorted to the point of unrecognizability. In his works, Ghenie is interested in memory and how contradictory cultural and personal memories can be. History, ultimately created from memory, is not a fixed, ultimate entity but instead personally tailored to the individual who experienced it. Each perspective, each viewpoint and each feeling is uniquely different; however, it is eventually blurred into one universally accepted and publicized version of events.

 

Having first worked on pie fight paintings in 2008, Ghenie returned to the subject in 2012 with his first solo exhibition in America Adrian Ghenie: Pie-Fights and Pathos, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, during the fall of 2012. The act of throwing a pie into another person’s face originated in the early 20^th century and was picked up on and made famous by American movie stars such as Charlie Chaplin, the three Stooges and Laurel & Hardie. It typically represented a humorous and slapstick way to humiliate or shame another person. However, Ghenie takes this comical element and applies it to a much darker side of human behaviour. The main protagonists in Ghenie’s pie fight studies are figures from Germany’s Nazi history. Defaced beyond recognition in thick, bold swathes of paint, Ghenie plays with our perception of reality. It becomes unclear whether the figure is truly covered in layers of cream or whether the face itself has begun to deteriorate and we are in fact looking at skin broken up and flesh laid bare. Ghenie’s fascination with history and the trauma of dictatorship is beautifully met with the lighter hearted, comical element of the pie. In his opinion “It’s […] about humiliation, which is a very strange ritual in the human species and still one of the most important features of a dictatorship. The best way to terrorize people is to humiliate them” (Adrian Ghenie quoted in: Rachel Wolff, ‘IN THE STUDIO: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie's Sinister Mythology’, Art and Auction, March 2013).