Adrian Ghenie

The Brave New World

Past
Nov 10 – Dec 22, 2023
New York

Exhibition Details:

Adrian Ghenie
The Brave New World
Nov 10 – Dec 22, 2023

Gallery:

510 West 25th Street
New York

Press:

Press Release

Connect:

(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Installation view, Adrian Ghenie: The Brave New World, Nov 10 – Dec 22, 2023, Pace Gallery, New York © Adrian Ghenie

Pace is pleased to present The Brave New World, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Adrian Ghenie, at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York.

The works in the show—on view from November 10 to December 22—examine the constantly evolving relationship between the human body and technology, meditating on the ways that digital devices and fugitive images have fundamentally altered our everyday existence and experience of the world. This presentation will also pose questions about the uses of painting itself, exploring how the medium can articulate the effects of the radical technological advancements of the past 20 years.

Widely considered one of the most dynamic and versatile painters of his generation, Ghenie has reinvented his style time and again. Best known for lush renderings of figures in layered, cinematic compositions that mine visual, political, and social histories—in particular those of Central Europe and his native Romania—the artist has often examined the conditions of contemporary life by turning his focus to a particular genre, era, or subject in developing new bodies of work.

In the last several years, Ghenie’s works have meditated on the culture of disconnection and alienation in a technologically saturated world. He conjures the banality of the current moment through lusciously painted works in oil, as well as large-scale drawings in charcoal, which move seamlessly between abstraction and figuration. The figures in his works are often obsessively checking their cellphones, illuminated by the screens of their laptop computers, or caught in the gaze of a surveillance apparatus, their bodies dissolving and unraveling before the viewer’s eyes.

The works that Ghenie will show in his upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York include more than a dozen paintings and a suite of gestural drawings in which the artist develops many of the ideas and motifs in his canvases. In his new compositions, distorted and contorted figures clutch phones in their hands, pressing the devices to their faces or hunching over glowing screens. Ghenie’s images speak to the contradictions of these ubiquitous devices, which, despite their purported ability to foster interpersonal connections, also detach their users from the world at large, exacerbating an anxious, isolated mood that—in Ghenie’s view—pervades daily life today.

In one large-scale painting, a mass of roiling, exploding marks evokes the presence of a figure standing in a bedroom, staring up at a wall-mounted TV that bears an image of former US President Donald Trump. Gesturing to the ways that the Orwellian conditions of modern life have obliterated privacy in domestic spaces, Ghenie renders the thinking subject in this work as an incoherent mass, lost within a sea of images and sounds, of information and disinformation. Next to the figure lies an open suitcase, suggesting the aesthetics of escape or retreat, as well as the futility of accessing a realm “outside” regimes of mediation.

In another painting, Ghenie alludes to the way visual culture has been used as a vehicle for amplifying protests against climate change. Controversial situations and ethically ambiguous events have always been of great interest to the artist, and such protests—which involve attacks on works of art as ways of drawing attention to questions of environmental policy—have elicited heated debates in the art world and beyond. The Just Stop Oil demonstrations at the National Gallery in London are of particular interest to the artist, having centered on Vincent van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers, a painting to which Ghenie has frequently referred in his own art. With his reinterpretation of widely circulated images, Ghenie depicts the protestors’ bodies contorted into coils as they pose for media photos, with their hands and feet glued to a museum wall displaying van Gogh’s soup-stained masterpiece.

Two other large-scale works in the exhibition depict groups of visitors seated inside museum galleries, with works by van Gogh and Diego Velázquez hanging on the walls behind them. In these deeply ambiguous scenes, Ghenie leaves it to the viewer to interpret the motivations of his figures—whether they are there to look at the paintings on the wall or instead to look away, down at their phones, the artworks rendered all but invisible in a culture of distraction and dislocation.

In one of the most striking images in the upcoming exhibition, Ghenie depicts an outsized hand grasping a phone, its glowing screen contracting into a grid of expressionistic blurs visible through the figure’s fingers. The hand—once a universal signifier of intimacy and touch—is transformed into an apparatus for navigating and consuming data. These disarticulated fingers seem to herald a “brave new world,” evoking the dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same name, in which our sense of what it means to be human is increasingly dismembered and fragmented, never to be made whole again.

Featured Works

The App 2 by Adrian Ghenie — Adrian Ghenie, *The App 2*, 2023, oil on canvas, 47-1/4" × 78-3/4" (120 cm × 200 cm) 48-9/16" × 80-1/16" × 2-3/4" (123.3 cm × 203.4 cm × 7 cm), frame

The Spanish Room by Adrian Ghenie — Adrian Ghenie, *The Spanish Room*, 2023, oil on canvas, 240 cm × 210 cm (94-1/2" × 82-11/16") 243.4 cm × 213.4 cm × 7 cm (95-13/16" × 84" × 2-3/4"), framed

The Hotel Room by Adrian Ghenie — Adrian Ghenie, *The Hotel Room*, 2023, oil on canvas, 210 cm × 180 cm (82-11/16" × 70-7/8") 213.4 cm × 183.4 cm × 7 cm (84" × 72-3/16" × 2-3/4"), framed

Study for "Studio Scene" by Adrian Ghenie — Adrian Ghenie, *Study for "Studio Scene"*, 2023, charcoal on paper, 100 cm × 65 cm (39-3/8" × 25-9/16") 113.6 cm × 78.6 cm × 5 cm (44-3/4" × 30-15/16" × 1-15/16"), framed

Installation Views

About the Artist

Adrian Ghenie surveys and subverts historical and artistic narratives through his paintings, which aim to unearth feelings of vulnerability, frustration, or desire, and often draw on human experience and ideas of the collective unconscious.

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