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Lot Essay
It is never the motif that interests me but always the texture of my subjects and how the transformation of this texture over time can tell a secret narrative. —— Adrian Ghenie
A vista of turbulent, vital colour and form spanning three metres across, Untitled (After Henri Rousseau) (2020) sees Adrian Ghenie’s renowned painterly eloquence reach incandescent new heights. At its heart is a powerful encounter between man and beast. The figures derive from Henri Rousseau’s iconic jungle scene Nègre attaqué par un jaguar (1910, Kunstmuseum Basel), which depicts a man attacked by a jaguar. In Ghenie’s vision, the action takes place before a concrete wall and a roiling, gunmetal sky, with vaporous blooms of pigment and dark, palette-knifed umber streaks that carve through space. The man’s dark silhouette leans forward, with billowing, inky-blue brushstrokes licking up his body like flames. The wild cat is conveyed in a swirling melee of ochre, orange and turquoise, variously marbled and masked off to create sharp, dynamic outlines. If the motif emerged from Rousseau, the work’s array of textures and techniques evokes artists from Francis Bacon to Willem de Kooning and Gerhard Richter. The drama of tangled limbs, meanwhile, displays Ghenie’s close affinity with Baroque painting, conjuring muscular depictions of Classical and Biblical lion-wrestlers such as Hercules and Samson.
Ghenie rose to prominence in the 2010s for powerful, layered and cinematic paintings that were concerned with the dark moments and pivotal figures of European history. Filtered through collations of found photographic imagery, they included reflections on the Second World War and life under communism in his native Romania, and featured the distorted countenances of Charles Darwin and Vincent van Gogh. In recent years, Ghenie has evolved his style in new directions, turning his gaze towards contemporary life and imagining the future. He has also widened his palette of art-historical references, engaging in open dialogue with Andrea Mantegna, Théodore Géricault and—as in the present work—Henri Rousseau. As well as working with collage studies, he develops his ideas in large-scale charcoal drawings, whose sweeping elegance can be felt in the present painting.
It’s the only way to get a good figurative painting: to build it with abstract bricks. ——Adrian Ghenie
Rousseau has long fascinated Ghenie. The self-taught artist, who died in 1910, is famed for his visionary and highly distinctive jungle paintings. They were admired during his lifetime by avant-garde figures including Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși and Robert Delaunay, and later by the Surrealists, who were drawn to their dreamlike moods and unusual juxtapositions. Their carefully delineated surfaces of flat, overlapping planes also foreshadowed aspects of Modernism, and Ghenie has described Rousseau as the first abstract painter. Figurative and abstract paintings, he believes, are engaged with the same fundamental problems: ‘Deep inside every painting exists a deep abstract challenge’ (A. Ghenie in conversation with M. Gnyp, Zoo Magazine, No. 57, 2017). The present work, with its combination of spontaneous Abstract Expressionist gestures, grid-like backdrop and energetic bodily form, exemplifies Ghenie’s own synthesis of different formal languages.
Ghenie first showed works on the Rousseau theme in his 2018 exhibition Jungles in Paris at Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris. He took the exhibition’s name from the major Rousseau retrospective staged at Tate, London, the Grand Palais, Paris and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. in 2005-2006. This title also foregrounds the jarring contrast created by placing the jungle’s wild life-force into an urban context. Ghenie’s paintings—as in the present work’s jaguar, concrete wall and polluted sky—might be seen to speak to current ecological themes, picturing mankind’s toxic footprint upon the natural world. ‘… I’m choosing a fragment from art history which I’m replying to’, Ghenie explains. ‘But then I warp that into a subject or another situation which is more contemporary’ (A. Ghenie in conversation with M. Peppiatt, in J. Judin, ed., Adrian Ghenie Paintings 2014-19, Berlin 2020, p. 151).
A vista of turbulent, vital colour and form spanning three metres across, Untitled (After Henri Rousseau) (2020) sees Adrian Ghenie’s renowned painterly eloquence reach incandescent new heights. At its heart is a powerful encounter between man and beast. The figures derive from Henri Rousseau’s iconic jungle scene Nègre attaqué par un jaguar (1910, Kunstmuseum Basel), which depicts a man attacked by a jaguar. In Ghenie’s vision, the action takes place before a concrete wall and a roiling, gunmetal sky, with vaporous blooms of pigment and dark, palette-knifed umber streaks that carve through space. The man’s dark silhouette leans forward, with billowing, inky-blue brushstrokes licking up his body like flames. The wild cat is conveyed in a swirling melee of ochre, orange and turquoise, variously marbled and masked off to create sharp, dynamic outlines. If the motif emerged from Rousseau, the work’s array of textures and techniques evokes artists from Francis Bacon to Willem de Kooning and Gerhard Richter. The drama of tangled limbs, meanwhile, displays Ghenie’s close affinity with Baroque painting, conjuring muscular depictions of Classical and Biblical lion-wrestlers such as Hercules and Samson.
Ghenie rose to prominence in the 2010s for powerful, layered and cinematic paintings that were concerned with the dark moments and pivotal figures of European history. Filtered through collations of found photographic imagery, they included reflections on the Second World War and life under communism in his native Romania, and featured the distorted countenances of Charles Darwin and Vincent van Gogh. In recent years, Ghenie has evolved his style in new directions, turning his gaze towards contemporary life and imagining the future. He has also widened his palette of art-historical references, engaging in open dialogue with Andrea Mantegna, Théodore Géricault and—as in the present work—Henri Rousseau. As well as working with collage studies, he develops his ideas in large-scale charcoal drawings, whose sweeping elegance can be felt in the present painting.
It’s the only way to get a good figurative painting: to build it with abstract bricks. ——Adrian Ghenie
Rousseau has long fascinated Ghenie. The self-taught artist, who died in 1910, is famed for his visionary and highly distinctive jungle paintings. They were admired during his lifetime by avant-garde figures including Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși and Robert Delaunay, and later by the Surrealists, who were drawn to their dreamlike moods and unusual juxtapositions. Their carefully delineated surfaces of flat, overlapping planes also foreshadowed aspects of Modernism, and Ghenie has described Rousseau as the first abstract painter. Figurative and abstract paintings, he believes, are engaged with the same fundamental problems: ‘Deep inside every painting exists a deep abstract challenge’ (A. Ghenie in conversation with M. Gnyp, Zoo Magazine, No. 57, 2017). The present work, with its combination of spontaneous Abstract Expressionist gestures, grid-like backdrop and energetic bodily form, exemplifies Ghenie’s own synthesis of different formal languages.
Ghenie first showed works on the Rousseau theme in his 2018 exhibition Jungles in Paris at Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris. He took the exhibition’s name from the major Rousseau retrospective staged at Tate, London, the Grand Palais, Paris and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. in 2005-2006. This title also foregrounds the jarring contrast created by placing the jungle’s wild life-force into an urban context. Ghenie’s paintings—as in the present work’s jaguar, concrete wall and polluted sky—might be seen to speak to current ecological themes, picturing mankind’s toxic footprint upon the natural world. ‘… I’m choosing a fragment from art history which I’m replying to’, Ghenie explains. ‘But then I warp that into a subject or another situation which is more contemporary’ (A. Ghenie in conversation with M. Peppiatt, in J. Judin, ed., Adrian Ghenie Paintings 2014-19, Berlin 2020, p. 151).