Adrian Ghenie

Adrian Ghenie belongs to the most brilliant and sought-after artists of his generation. In his studio in Berlin he talks with me about his art, luck and our distorted relationship to art history.

Marta Gnyp: Do you feel at home in Berlin?
Adrian Ghenie: I’m a Romanian living in Berlin. I still think in Romanian – I never learned German.

MG: I think you like to keep a distance.
AG: I do. The idea of integration has been an alien concept to me. Integrate into what? I was never integrated into anything. I have always felt like an outsider. It is a feeling you are born with

MG: Do you also feel like an outsider while in Cluj?

AG: Coming from Berlin makes you different. Being internationally successful isolates you more than anything and more than you want, to the point where it becomes very weird.

MG: Because people treat you like a god?

AG: It activates a whole spectrum of irrational feelings towards you. Jealousy, love, fantasies and conspiracy theories – people are creating a distorted image about you.

MG: Do you try to explain yourself?

AG: After a certain point, I realized that you cannot change anything. No matter how hard you try, it will only add more to irrational explanations. They consider everything but honest, altruistic purposes.

MG: I assume these projections and feelings are not limited to just Romania?

AG: Depending on the group, they will project what they need onto you. I read a random article written by a guy named Kenny Schachter – whom I don’t know – who was reporting about an auction. He mentioned that I was supposedly calling the auction house to say that they put the starting price on a piece too low. There is a moment after a certain level of notoriety when people start to put words in your mouth.

MG: Does this somehow influence your work? Your work shows the dark side of human beings and of the history.

AG: My work is more like a Jungian dream, which is not necessarily bad or good – it simply is. I’m not investigating the dark side of the history. I’m interested in paradoxes within the history that is there. So, I dive into a collective subconsciousness that already exists and is weird and paradoxical, without a clear direction.

ALPINE RETREAT, 2017

MG: So the viewers have to make sense of it themselves.

AG: I found a correlation in my own approach with the method of director David Lynch. When you watch his films for the first time, they are dark and creepy. It is hard to point out exactly what is going on – it’s like a dream. The only thing you know is that you want to watch it, which is more important than clarifying whether it is a good or bad movie. With my paintings, I don’t really care if people give them a verdict of good or bad. For me, it matters that they are interested to look at them

MG: The image never ends in your paintings.

AG: One of the artists I was always inspired by was Titian, during the Renaissance in Venice. He painted semi-transparent layers, one upon the other, so each layer functions as a light box for the next. If you want to have a very special red, you will put a red yellow under it. Or if you want the red to be cold, you would use blue. Imagine how abstract you are required to think! You start a composition that, in the end, has to be a crucifixion, with spots of color that are completely different from the final image. This sense of anticipation fascinates me. You work with this painting in an in-between phase for months, and all the layers are created to get to the final one.

MG: Is this the way in which you paint?

AG: The surface of my paintings is built in layers too but differently, and that creates their richness. I hope that people will respond to that quality, even in an unconscious way. You look at the image first, but the image is not actually relevant. There are thousands of images of crucifixions from Titian’s time, and they are boring. The complexity of the optic juxtaposition of so many layers gives it its quality in the end.

MG: Do you start with a clear image in your head?

AG: Sixty percent of it.

MG: Did you acquire knowledge about Old Masters like Titian at the Academy, or did you discover them on your own?

AG: I applied to art academy in Cluj, but failed. I don’t blame them because I was nothing special at that time, and the academy was sponsored by the state with only 16 places available a year. The competition was vicious. I started to think about how to get there, and asked an academy teacher to coach me, which was common. They would teach you what to do in order to fulfill the academy’s expectations. At the same time at home, however, I did a lot of copies of Rembrandt and Titian, mostly from books. But I also looked at originals in a museum in Sibiu that has a fantastic collection. I read about the technicalities of each period – how to paint on wood and on canvas, how to paint a fresco, and also how to prepare the canvasses.

MG: You were a classical painter when you entered the Academy.

AG: People imagine that an art academy in Romania is very academic. It’s actually to the contrary. My teachers were more abstract painters – figuration was not done.

MG: Because they wanted to escape the politics?

AG: My teachers were of Generation 68, most of whom painted or wanted to paint like the Americans – Rauschenberg or Pollock. The worst thing one could say in this climate was that they wanted to do a copy of Rembrandt, so I kept that to myself.

MG: Did you learn a lot during the copying process?

AG: Copying is an attempt to reconstruct, like what police do when they re-enact a crime. In my case, this period got a special unexpected dimension, which is embarrassing right now. During the 90s, my financial situation was dreadful. I was very poor, so I painted a lot of trashy paintings for people and sometimes for hotel lobbies.

MG: Are they now putting them up at auctions?

AG: Yes. [laughs]

MG: What did you paint?

AG: My mother’s neighbours would ask me to paint a nice landscape, and would give me 50 DM. Back then, I never expected that the Internet would be invented, and all this stuff would appear online. Sometimes I would make a copy of a Pissarro or a Renoir. Most commissions were based on a religious theme, such as Christ or a crucifixion, which I knew exactly how to paint because I had inexhaustible resources for this type of imagery, such as Velazquez. These works are artistically irrelevant to my CV, but at the same time they played a role in my learning process.

CHRIST, 2000

MG: Did you need to make loads of irrelevant art to find your own voice?

AG: There is a funny bias in the thinking of gallerists, curators and critics. They expect you to come out of nowhere and suddenly paint something brilliant. Nobody wants to understand that there is a point in your career where you are making shit. Normally, most of the material from this stage would disappear, but now it all stays online.

MG: How did you experience your Academy time during the 90s?

AG: In the 90s, everybody was poor and everything was cheap. Somehow, we survived with very little. That Pissarro landscape gave me a lot of freedom because with 50 DM, I could go out and have drinks with my friends for many times over a few months.

MG: How did you cope with the absurdities of the system?

AG: There was a factory in Bucharest supplying paint, brushes and stretches for artists, but only to artists’ union stores. I remember, as a 16 year old, going to a store wanting to buy colours to paint. Since I was not a member of the artists’ union, the lady in the shop couldn’t sell me white, black or red – the only color she could give me was violet because nobody wanted violet.

MG: Did you ever convince her to sell you the other colours?

AG: I did. In the end, we became good friends, so she would sell me more material. I never convinced her to sell me white though.

MG: What about brushes?

AG: I shaved my cat to make brushes. We made frames using beams from fences.

MG: What happened when you finished at the Academy and real life began?

AG: I graduated in 2001. At that time, Romania was kind of an outcast from the rest of the world. Only since 2005, the EU has become more relaxed about Romanians traveling to the West. I managed to travel for a short amount of time to the West because my friend’s father sent us invitations and declared to pay the expenses.

MG: Were you fascinated by the West?

AG: Of course.

MG: Is your art infused with history because you witnessed all of these historical transformations?

AG: My family is more to blame. My grandmother was Tatar Russian – a dramatic case. Born in 1911, she lost 11 brothers, as well as her mother and father during the civil war in just one winter. My great-grandfathers were rich shepherds who left Romania in the 19th century, heading to the East looking for large areas to feed their herds of animals. My father was born in 1933 in Crimea. My Russian grandmother, who never really spoke Romanian well, would tell me all the stories. I was fascinated.

MG: Your early works from around 2008 were called Basement Feelings. Was that your feeling of the time?

AG: They were made in relation to my father and the last years of his life. I knew my father as a depressed dentist who was too bored to go to work, and who was sick and tired of his patients. My mother and father gradually began to live separate, parallel lives. He withdrew from all his responsibilities and started collecting junk, rubbish and objects that he placed in his garage and the basement next to it. It was like a jungle.

BASEMENT FEELING, 2004

MG: Did he go mad?

AG: He was kind of a maniac. He had thousands of empty bottles. He drank half of them by himself. Also car wheels, 2 guns that he owned legally because he was a hunter – all kind of objects. He had this idea that one day he would repair all of these things, and we would need them. He slowly created this amazing atmospheric installation. My mother would tell me to go downstairs to get him for lunch, so I would go there and sometimes we would talk a bit, and he would show me something. This environment was unique. Our neighbors had impeccable garages, where they kept their pickles and cars. When my father died, I had to clean the space, which was an incredible journey throughout the family history.

MG: Was it magic?

AG: It was. And it was scary at the same time, because it was so dirty and full of weird objects that you could barely find your way around.

Read the full interview in the book.