Merging past and present, reality and imagination, Adrian Ghenie’s Pie Fight Interior is a lesson in the spectacle and tragedy of history. The present work belongs to the artist’s esteemed Pie Fight series, which he began in 2008 and returned to again in 2012. The works in the series negotiate the atrocities central to twentieth-century European history, and through a sublime fusion of abstraction and figuration, Ghenie confronts the issues of collective memory.

In sweeps of ochre, violet, amber and bronze, the surface of Pie Fight Interior swirls and pulsates, illuminating the artist’s energetic handing of paint. Using the brush liberally, Ghenie obfuscates the scene to a degree of ambiguity, the spectre-like figure alternately appearing and disappearing amidst overlapping strata of pigment. Ghenie’s interior is sumptuous. The viewer can surmise the outline of a lush oriental carpet, delineated by loose brushstrokes of aubergine, magenta and cobalt; a blooming bouquet sits atop a table, the flowers and vase melting into the work’s impastoed ground. A stately, yellow upholstered armchair interrupts Ghenie’s abstraction; the throne-like form positioned away from the viewer, provides an eerie resting place for the ghostly figure. Here the human form is haunting and largely abstract, yet its most identifiable feature is a short, dark mustache – an undisguised allusion to Adolf Hitler, and indeed to the history of dictatorship in the Twentieth Century. 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 visualised with the aid of historical photographic documentation.

The present work was included in the critically acclaimed Palazzo Strozzi exhibition Francis Bacon and the Existentialist Condition in Contemporary Art (2012-13), which aptly probed the connection between Bacon and Ghenie’s work. Bacon’s visual lexicon is steeped
in references to the atrocities of the Second World War, and some of his most significant works, including Painting 1946 (1946; The Museum of Modern Art) and Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; Guggenheim Collection), reveal the artist’s propensity to engage with Fascist imagery and employ photographic news clippings as primary source material. Photographs of Hitler and Mussolini in mid-speech had a pervasive effect upon Bacon, as did images of the physical spaces surrounding such figures – the drawn blinds in Painting 1946 were taken directly from a widely- circulated photograph of Hitler’s bunker. Both Bacon and Ghenie explore the framework of dictatorship, its brutal ugliness, and the associated post-war fear of destruction and death to haunting effect. Yet 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 exemplifies Ghenie’s interest in the darkest parts of twentieth-century history, and the emblematic image of Hitler here forces his viewers to bear witness.

Ghenie’s Pie Fight 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 appearedin 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’s pie fight scenes on YouTube and found their underlying themes of shame and abasement 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 cited in: Ibid.).

Throughout the Pie Fight series, Ghenie disfigures his subjects’ faces with impasto sweeps of white pigment, visualising humiliation via a literal ‘loss of face’. To obfuscate Hitler’s features with paint the colour of custard cream is to usurp and degrade the potency of his image, thus Ghenie’s painterly language turns 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 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.
Pie Fight Interior problematises recent historical 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.