Adrian Ghenie’s lushly painted, powerful canvases blur the distinction between figuration and abstraction, often referencing art history and/or politics in a style that recalls gestural paintings by Chaim Soutine, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, and Lynn Foulkes. While attending art school in Romania, he had limited access to western contemporary art.In 2008, under an oppressive Romanian regime, Ghenie began to explore themes of twentieth-century history and memory, evoking some of the period’s more menacing figures such as Nicolae Ceauşsescu, and Adolf Hitler, Josef Mengele, and Joseph Stalin, whose painted images he smeared, scumbled, effaced, and ultimately located in dreamlike, abstracted spaces. A sense of alienation, angst, and despair collide with Ghenie’s sensuous use of thick paint, applied with a palette knife. Ghenie’s works evoke various social and political upheavals in Europe; Rest during the Flight into Egypt refers to the Syrian refugee crisis that began in 2011.
