"… to lose is the rule and to win is the weird exception!

"

Little was known about Adrian Ghenie until recently: along with Mihai Pop, he founded
Plan B Gallery, famous for putting Cluj on the international art map with a new
generation of artists, and he has emerged as Romania’s best-selling contemporary painter
and one of the most-appreciated in the wider world.
Born in 1977 in the Romanian city of Baia Mare, he studied at the University of Art and
Design in Cluj, and moved between there and Berlin until 2013 when he finally chose the
German capital.
Ghenie's paintings are gestural in the making. He chooses not to use the traditional tools
of the painter opting for a palette knife and stencils. There is not a brush in sight. "You
cannot paint this with a brush. It's simply the result of an accident. Everything is an
accident. Very few things are actually painted."
Adrian Ghenie represented Romania at the Venice Art Biennale (May 9th – November
22nd, 2015) with his project, Darwin's Room (curator: Mihai Pop). Besides the idea of
representing Romania at the Venice Biennale, he had another reason, a purely artistic
one. He does something that people usually doesn’t do – putting himself in a hostile
context, being uncomfortable to push his limits. He says: "Because there you see how
good your painting really is, whether it has the power to persuade. And again, that type
of pressure isn't comfortable, now, in a way, I feel a bit like a plane taking off, like the
point of no return, I have to do this and I have to take it to the limit, it forces me into
higher revs. There's going to be a horribly mixed audience, they'll all be there, from
painting groupies to it's worst critics. And so that's why I said, <<At the end of the day,
why not?>> ". Many people thinks he’s playing safe, but as an artist, Adrian Ghenie tries
the most hostile environments, doing the most unconventional exhibitions.
His initial project for the exhibition included Adam Curtis as a guest, the author of a
series of documentaries about 20th century history seen from the perspective of power, but
BBC didn’t allowed Curtis’ material to be broadcasted outside of their program. His
invitation to Adam came as a natural result of meetings with him and of the discussions
about history in a psychoanalytical perspective. Adrian Ghenie’s collaboration with
Adam Curtis has no deadline or obligations, so he decided not to allow Adam to
participate in Venice. About the Curtis influence in his exhibition, he says: "My
conversations with Curtis have rearranged the way I work with historical material,
getting further away from narrating history and closer to history's contradictions. I'd say
that for me (and for the proposal Mihai Pop and I made to him for the pavilion) Adam
Curtis has had the role of a catalyst, which, with or without the films he put together to
match my painting, has stayed intact. "
Why `Darwin’s Room’? From his point of view, Darwin is not a closed book, `there was
life before and after him`, the paradigm is way too large to be fully digested so he has the
opinion that everything which happened in the 20th century has its roots in Darwin -
"from Marx to eugenics to modern racism. In fact, it's a totally current thing. Terrorists,
for example, are fighting against a world which embraces Darwin. Western positivism,
where everything's rational, has a cause and an effect, doesn't really match the irrational
way of the old world, which they still believe in. Darwin is the person who, for the first
time, proved something scientifically which took the God debate into a completely
different area. And I think it hasn't been fully digested, not even now. That, let's say,
could be its thematic explanation. It's essentially a painting exhibition, but it contains
some ingredients which make it much more than that. I don't want to put on just a solo
painting show. "
Ghenie is not the only painter from Cluj to emerge on the international scene. He says
"They all have this DNA, the fact that they came from there and managed to conquer the
West and made a lot of money is unnatural." Ghenie takes nothing for granted. His
upbringing has prepared him for the worse, "I grew up with the mentality that to lose is
the rule and to win is the weird exception!"

Bibliography
The Independent, June 2014 Article by Karen Wright
Dilema veche, nr. 578, 12th March, 2015.
NY ARTS, 2014 Article by Paul Black
The Brooklyn Rail, April 2013 Article by Alana Shilling-Janoff