Adrian Ghenie

Adrian Ghenie – Art studies, gallery founder, and first international successes

Adrian Ghenie was born in Baia Mare in Romania in 1977 and studied at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. He co-founded Galeria Plan B in 2005, namely because despite persistent efforts, adequate representation by an already established gallery for ‘Plan A’ could not be realised. His daring paid off, and in the years that followed Adrian Ghenie held various solo exhibitions not only in his homeland of Romania, but in Germany, Switzerland and Great Britain, and finally made the jump across the ocean to the USA. In 2009, Ghenie celebrated the first monograph dedicated to him, covering a comprehensive selection of 70 works, and in November of that year, the National Museum of Bucharest honoured him with a first retrospective. 

Dictator as inspiration and subject; proximity to classical films

The vanquished Ceausescu dictatorship is an important hotbed for Adrian Ghenie’s art. He is one of the last Romanian artists for whom this dark era plays a formative role; the generation after has grown up in a post-socialist environment and is orientated towards other themes closer to home. With his own spontaneous, strangely imprecise brushstrokes, Ghenie often shows the horror that is still present for him. Often dispensing with fine tools, he instead makes use of a coarse palette knife with which he virtually ‘smears’ many of his pictures onto the canvas, supported by his own specially made stencils and interspersed with occasional explosions of colour reminiscent of the pie fights of early film comedies. Adrian Ghenie generally likes to refer to classic film masterpieces, and is equally fascinated by history, which he stages in collages of photographs, newspaper cuttings, video scenes and hand-painted works in somber black and grey tones. 

Venice Biennale brought worldwide fame

Ghenie’s early work was recognised, but not celebrated. The great breakthrough came in 2015 with his participation in the Romanian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In the meantime, works by Adrian Ghenie are offered for dizzying sums – which not only brings pleasure but also sometimes mistrust. Not only the artist himself publicly feared that the art world was using his work for financial speculation. Even renowned galleries which actually profited well from the jump in interest in Ghenie, are not yet sure where the Romanian master’s path will lead. At the moment, the only thing that is clear is that it will become increasingly difficult to acquire a ‘real Ghenie’ in the near future – and considerable financial resources will have to be spent in doing so. 

Adrian Ghenie lives and works in Cluj and in particular in Berlin where he runs a branch of his Galeria Plan B near his patron Juerg Judin.