A t once blazingly resplendent and deeply, viscerally haunting, Adrian Ghenie’s Pie Fight Interior 9 amalgamates past and present, reality and imagination, catastrophe and comedy, culminating in a monumental treatise in the spectacle and tragedy of history. The work belongs to the artist’s esteemed Pie Fight series, which he began in 2008 and returned to again in 2012. Suffused with wit, gestural bravura and psychological intensity, the Pie Fight series masterfully negotiates the atrocities central to twentieth-century European history and confronts issues of collective memory. The series takes its name from the 1941 Three Stooges film In the Sweet Pie and Pie, in which the wily protagonists, Curly, Larry and Moe, plot a pie fight. The trope of the pie fight is central to American slapstick comedy, and first appeared in silent films such as Behind the Screen (1916), starring Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy’s The Battle of the Century (1927).

Ghenie discovered the films’ pie fight scenes on YouTube and found their underlying themes of shame and abasement powerfully distressing: “When I cropped these images from the films, I realised it was a very psychological, very powerful image… It’s also 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 terrorise people is to humiliate them” (Adrian Ghenie in conversation with Rachael Wolff, ‘In the Studio: Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology’, Blouin Artinfo, March 2013, online). Conflating images of slapstick comedy with iconic images from Nazi history, Ghenie smears, scrapes, and blurs scenes and faces from key historical Nazi moments mined from archival imagery, forcing viewers to bear witness to the profound trauma and humiliation of recent history.

In variegated sweeps and scrapes of crimson, maroon and hot pink, the sumptuous surface of Pie Fight Interior 9 writhes and pulsates, illuminating the artist’s virtuosic handling of paint and brush. Obfuscating the scene to a calibrated degree of ambiguity, Ghenie masterfully orchestrates the continuous appearance and disappearance of the spectre-like tableau amidst the overlapping strata of pigment. The viewer can surmise a lush carpet, a chest of drawers, a window, and a stately upholstered armchair in bubblegum pink, within which a ghostly figure in green resides. Here the human form is haunting and largely abstract, yet when unpacking the imagery of the present work, Ghenie’s plush room begins to transform into the ceremonial interiors of the Nazi regime, an architectural space that recurs throughout the Pie Fight series, and which he visualized with the aid of historical photographic documentation. To obfuscate such imagery is to usurp and degrade the potency of the image, turning the power dynamics of dictatorship on its head. As curator Nora Burnett Abrams suggests, “Beyond humiliation, the transfiguration from individual to type is a vicious swipe on the artist’s part to alter – destroy, really – this historical legacy… By attacking his distinctive features and sullying his face with thick strokes of oil paint, Ghenie delivers his most vicious attack: To make Hitler into an anonymous figure upends the authorial power he once held” (Nora Burnett Abrams cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, Pace Gallery, Adrian Ghenie: New Paintings, 2013, p. 14). The theme of the cream pie offers a physical and comedic representation of punishment, and the trope of the pie fight enables Ghenie to confront atrocity with humour, and indeed, revenge.

Ghenie’s fascination with the notion of dictatorship spans beyond the theatre of the Second World War and to the horrors of his own country’s totalitarian regime under Nicolae Ceausescu from 1967 to 1989. Born in 1977, Ghenie has described a profound sense of humiliation and psychological trauma: “What happened with the Communists, Nazis, all of this… My generation, we were all losers historically, economically. There was no culture of winning. Winning under a dictatorship is to make a deal with the power, which is a moral dead end. A black hole. I realised how complicated the history of Eastern Europe is, from a moral perspective, from a psychological perspective, because everybody was, at the time, both killer and victim” (Adrian Ghenie in conversation with Rachael Wolff, ‘In the Studio: Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie’s Sinister Mythology’, Blouin Artinfo, March 2013, online). A psychologically charged composition, Pie Fight Interior 9 exemplifies Ghenie’s interest in the darkest parts of twentieth-century history and his project of problematizing such events through a painterly transfiguration of space and time. Through erasure, effacing and overpainting, Ghenie’s work indicates subtle slippages between comedy and tragedy, reminding us that the profound trauma and humiliation of recent history lingers in the space between reality and personal memory, fact and fiction.

亞 德里安．格尼的《餡餅鬥室內9》運色奪目而大膽，令人一見已從內心深處感到毛骨悚然——過去與現在、現實與想像、災難與喜劇，將歷史場景及悲劇，一一積累在這幅畫面中。
格尼以超凡的用色和運筆技巧，將深紅、褐紫紅與亮粉紅潑灑在本作的畫面上，各種色彩斑駁陸離，畫面質感豐富，觀眾幾乎能夠感受到當中的翻騰與脈動。在相互交疊的顏料之間，格尼精心掌控這些鬼魅般的人像，讓他們若隱若現地出現在畫面中，機關算盡地令場景混淆至一種模棱兩可的狀態。觀眾依然可以從中分辨到一張厚實的地毯、一整櫃的抽屜、一個窗戶、一張頗有氣派的糖果粉紅色扶手座椅，以及椅上一個幽靈般的綠色人形。畫中的人形魅影十分抽象，但當觀眾越觀察並解構作品中的各種象徵時，這個以各種歷史圖像拼接組成的奢華房間，就會逐漸化身為屬於納粹政權的空間，亦是常出現在「餡餅大戰」系列的建築物。藝術家混淆這些圖像，旨在篡奪並貶低圖像本身的權力意味、推翻極權者的掌控。正如策展人諾拉·伯內特·艾布拉姆斯（Nora Burnett Abrams）所形容：「藝術家這樣將個人轉化為一個形象，不只是一種侮辱，藝術家更是惡意地篡改、甚至摧毀 這些歷史遺產⋯⋯格尼攻擊畫中主角顯眼易認的五官，以厚實的油彩肆意玷污他的面孔，這是最惡毒的攻擊；將希特拉（Hitler）化為一個無名小卒，推翻他曾掌握的極權」（諾拉·伯內特·艾布拉姆斯，載於展覽圖錄《亞德里安．格尼：新畫作》，紐約，佩斯畫廊，2013年，頁14）。忌廉餡餅的主題，讓這一個懲罰變得更實在亦更喜劇化，而這個餡餅大戰也讓格尼能夠以幽默面對及報復這些暴行。

格尼不只對二次世界大戰的極權感到著迷，他亦同樣在意在尼古拉．希奧塞古（Nicolae Ceausescu）的極權統治下，於1967至1989年在他祖國中發生的暴行。生於1977年的格尼曾經歷深層的屈辱與心理創傷，他形容：「共產政權、納粹份子等等這些事⋯⋯ 我的這一代，我們在歷史上、經濟上都是輸家。什麼也算不上是贏。在極權統治之下的勝利，即是要與這個政權交易，也是道德上的淪陷。一個黑洞。我發現到這部分的東歐歷史，在道德上及心理上都是非常複雜，因為所有人都同時是加害者及被害者。（格尼與瑞秋·沃爾夫（Rachael Wolff）對話，〈工作室內：羅馬尼亞畫家亞德里安．格尼的邪惡神話〉，《布魯昂藝術雜誌》，2013年3月，網上資源）《餡餅鬥室內9》這幅充滿著心理象徵的圖畫，完美地展現了格尼對二十世紀歷史最黑暗部分的關注，以及他如何以藝術手法改寫這些事件的空間與時間，從而指出當中的問題。透過刪除、塗抹及交疊，格尼的作品低調地遊走於喜劇與悲劇之間，提醒我們這些近代史中的創傷與恥辱，依然殘留在現實與個人記憶、真相與虛構之間的空間內。格尼不只對二次世界大戰的極權感到著迷，他亦同樣在意在尼古拉．西奧塞古（Nicolae Ceausescu）的極權統治下，1967至1989年期間在祖國發生的暴行。生於1977年的格尼曾經歷深刻的屈辱和心理創傷，他形容：「共產政權、納粹份子等等這些事⋯⋯ 我的這一代，我們在歷史上、經濟上都是輸家。什麼也算不上是贏。在極權統治之下的勝利，即是要與這個政權交易，也是道德上的淪陷。一個黑洞。我發現到這部分的東歐歷史，在道德上及心理上都是非常複雜，因為所有人都同時是加害者和被害者」（格尼與瑞秋·沃爾夫（Rachael Wolff）對話，〈工作室內：羅馬尼亞畫家亞德里安．格尼的邪惡神話〉，《布魯昂藝術雜誌》，2013年3月，網上資源）。《餡餅鬥室內9》這幅充滿著心理象徵的作品，充分展現格尼對二十世紀歷史黑暗一頁的關注，以及他如何以藝術手法改寫這些事件的空間與時間，從而指出當中的問題。透過刪除、塗抹及交疊，格尼的作品低調地遊走於喜劇與悲劇之間，提醒我們這些近代史中的創傷與屈辱，依然殘留在現實與個人記憶、真相與虛構之間的空間裡。