Executed in 2016, Lidless Eye stands as a masterful and superlative work, imbued with a commanding gestural bravura and a profound psychological intensity that typifies Adrian Ghenie’s acclaimed self-portrait series centred on the image of Vincent van Gogh. Throughout his career, Ghenie has traversed the spectrum of art history – engaging with figures as influential as Charles Darwin, Vincent van Gogh, and Marcel Duchamp, as well as those whose notoriety has defined tumultuous epochs, including Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin, alongside popular cultural icons such as Elvis, Stan Laurel, and Oliver Hardy. Among these varied subjects, his self-portraits invoking the effigy of Van Gogh hold a particularly personal resonance, forming a crucial structural pillar in his rigorous dialogue with both historical and contemporary global narratives. Indeed, while the title Lidless Eye recurs across many of Ghenie’s pictures evoking the piercing stare of a Modern master, the phrase itself has a fantastical origin: it is a name used to refer to Sauron, the Dark Lord and title character of J. R. R. Tolkien’s iconic novels The Lord of the Rings. In this vivid tableau of blazing colour and palpable texture, Ghenie both pays homage to Van Gogh and intimates a subtle self-portrait, with his own dark, penetrating eye through history, both imaginary or otherwise, staring resolutely from the very heart of the composition.
The close-cropped visage, rendered in sweeping, marbled facets of crimson, pink, orange, and umber, dominates the canvas, commanding attention with a powerful presence. The background, imbued with blue-green hues reminiscent of Van Gogh’s palette, provides a dynamic counterpoint, while one eye contrasts sharply with the other. Ghenie’s mark-making is exceptionally varied, spanning from soft, vaporous blooms to sculptural, palette-knifed sweeps of thick impasto; dry-brushed skeins of upward motion evoke Van Gogh’s swirling arabesques, while whiplash scribbles cut through sharply defined, red-rimmed planes of masked-off paint, producing an almost collage-like effect. Delicate freckles and blushes converge with more visceral tones of bleeding and bruising, as if to lay the subject bare from within. Indeed, if the present work exalts the vital life-force of painting, it simultaneously manifests a state of distortion and flux, with latent danger simmering beneath its surface; a potent reflection of both artistic and historical tumult.
As a youth Ghenie was famously captivated by Van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers and fascinated by the story of a great artist and his affliction with mental illness. His own relationship with the present work’s source dates back to childhood memories of a magazine article entitled “The Tragic Life of Vincent van Gogh.” The lack of art books in the Ghenie household meant that this magazine would stay with the artist for years; on the front was an off-colour image of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, while the article itself illustrated a black and white image of the 1889 Van Gogh self-portrait in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In 1998, when visiting this museum for the first time, Ghenie’s encounter with Van Gogh’s self-portrait affected him deeply. Finding himself unexpectedly under the scrutiny of Van Gogh’s penetrating stare, Ghenie’s uneasiness descended into a violent fit of nausea. In his subsequent explorations of one of the most recognisable faces in art history, Ghenie draws from a multitude of historical genres. “You can’t invent a painting from scratch; you are working with an entire tradition…,” the artist noted, “The pictorial language of the 20th century, from Kurt Schwitters’s collages to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, makes up a range of possibilities that I utilise in order to create a transhistorical figurative painting–a painting of the image as such, of representation” (the artist cited in “Adrian Ghenie in Conversation with Magda Radu,” in Exh. Cat., Venice, Romanian Pavilion, Biennale de Venezia, Adrian Ghenie: Darwin’s Room, 2015, p. 31).
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Lidless Eye is a landmark work that not only pays tribute to Van Gogh but also engages with an expansive array of artistic influences. It evokes the consummate chiaroscuro of Renaissance painting, the raw psychological power of Francis Bacon’s portraiture, and the sophisticated surface manipulations characteristic of Gerhard Richter, which together create and dissolve the boundaries of illusory space. Bacon’s reinterpretation of Van Gogh’s self-portrait – embodied in his 1960 work Homage to Van Gogh (Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden) – stands as a pivotal moment in the recontextualisation of art history. In the late 1950s, Bacon also produced a series inspired by Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888), a work whose original is now lost; destroyed or possibly looted during the 1945 Allied bombings of Magdeburg when it was held in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. Consequently, the vanished original is known solely through reproductions and its transformative afterlife in the works of both Bacon and Ghenie. These spectral histories, haunted by what might have been, underpin Ghenie’s enduring preoccupation with Van Gogh.
Right: Vincent van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888.
Painted one year after Ghenie represented his native Romania in the 56th Venice Biennale, Ghenie’s Lidless Eyes testifies to his fluency over the medium of painting as a revelatory expression of the artist’s own mind. In the radical distortion and effacement of the artist’s imagery lies a prevailing theme of the collective unconscious: “I am particularly interested in the state of exceptionality that characterises everyday life in totalitarian regimes, not just Communism. In such circumstances, everything is being distorted.” (the artist quoted in: Magda Radu, “Adrian Ghenie: Rise & Fall,” Flash Art, December 2009, p. 50). Rendered in richly layered, pastose strokes, the present work emerges as a painterly palimpsest – a composite of masked identities and fragmented self-representation that alludes to the darker chapters of twentieth-century history and their lingering ramifications. In this extraordinary synthesis of the historical and the personal, Ghenie channels his lifelong adulation for Van Gogh and his preoccupation with the epoch’s most troubling events, manifesting Lidless Eye as an emblematic testament to his challenging revival of both history painting and the self-portrait.