Adrian Ghenie

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although they fail to convey the texture apparent in the original, and there are more magenta undertones to the white in the upper half of the composition, and to the brown towards the edges of the composition. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Growing up in Baia Mare, Romania, Ghenie was exposed to dramatic changes in political and social environments including the fall of communism and the emergence of democracy after tyrannical dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed on Christmas day, 1989. Amongst hardship, Ghenie recalls moments of serenity, noting that during the Communist regime there was “nothing to disturb you, no advertising or anything” and in some respects Ghenie’s paintings bridge a gap between personal turmoil and introspective moments of reflection (Mark Gisbourne, ‘The Inflected World of Adrian Ghenie’, Adrian Ghenie, Ostfildern 2014, p. 28). It was Romania where he was first exposed to a limited selection of Western films which account for his artistic connection to cinema - when searching for creative inspiration, he explains that “David Lynch came along and gave me the solution” continuing “In terms of composition, colours, atmosphere, I borrow many things from cinema” (Adrian Ghenie quoted in: Rachel Wolff, IN THE STUDIO: Romanian Painter Adrian Ghenie's Sinister Mythology, Art and Auction, March 2013).

The present work is a manipulated abstraction of a still in the comic film In the Sweet Pie and Pie by the Three Stooges, itself a humorous reworking of the title to the innocuous American Hymn, In the Sweet By and By. Even within the transition from hymn to humour there is a moral regression which Ghenie further exacerbates in this work; freezing and cropping the film he betrays the narrative to form a visceral and unsettling image. The figure is presented alone, accentuating the self-reflexive and psychological aspects of the individual persona, and when focussing on female figures, the result is by Ghenie’s own admission “even more disturbing” (op. cit., Rachel Wolff). Expanding on the nature of his work, Ghenie continues, “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 terrorize people is to humiliate them” (ibid.).

Personal memory and social history being essential to Ghenie’s practice, his subjects are manipulated in such a way that they form an erasure, a palimpsest, a notion of reminiscence that transcends immediate definition, yet seduces the viewer into a contemplation of ontology.