Detail of the present work
under the regime of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, eventually witnessing the revolution that concluded in the political leader’s execution. This experience serves as a backdrop to Ghenie’s politically-charged work to this day. In the manner of his painterly forbearers, such as Gerhard Richter, Ghenie explores the trauma of history through painting. The artist draws on found source material and art historical references, ofen combining photographs and flm stills, or building three-dimensional models to construct surreal, psychologically charged universes. A s Ghenie indeed asserted, ‘I’m not a history painter but I am fascinated by what happened in the 20th century and how it continues to shape today’ (Adrian Ghenie, quoted in Jane Neal, ‘Adrian Ghenie’, Art Review, issue 46, December 2010, p. 70). In Found, Ghenie presents us with Vladimir Lenin laying in state. While contorted with brief glimpses of detailed features, as evident in the work of Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon – a typical painterly strategy within Ghenie’s oeuvre – closer consideration reveals that the depiction of the fgure echoes period photographs of Lenin’s embalmed body on display in a mausoleum in Russia’s Red Square shortly afer his death in 1924.
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Consistent with Ghenie’s painterly style, Lenin’s face appears contorted, his features ghostly against the dark background. In the present work, we also see paint dragged across the picture plane recalling Richter’s squeegeed abstracts. Serving as the artist’s first treatment of the potency of Lenin’s image, Found precedes later works in which Ghenie zooms into the haunting image of Lenin’s face, such as The Leader, 2008, which resides in the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp. ‘You can’t invent a painting from scratch,’ Ghenie stated, ‘you are working with an entire tradition … The pictorial language of the twentieth century, from Kurt Schwitters’s collages to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, makes up a range of possibilities that I utilise in order to create a transhistorical fgurative painting – a painting of the image as such, of representation’ (Adrian Ghenie, quoted in ‘Adrian Ghenie in Conversation with Magda Radu’, Adrian Ghenie: Darwin’s Room, exh. cat., Romanian Pavilion, Biennale de Venezia, 2015, p. 31). Encapsulating the central tenets of Ghenie’s acclaimed painterly practice, Found transcends historical specificity to put forward a more universal investigation of trauma, memory, and human subjectivity, but also questions of representation at large.
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