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Lot Essay
“I seek images that go straight to your brain.” Adrian Ghenie
The protagonist of Adrian Ghenie’s Boogeyman (2010) hovers ominously at the edge of a monumental canvas more than three meters in width. From folklore to modern horror, the elusive, eldritch Boogeyman—muse of Goya’s Los Caprichos, villain of Stephen King’s short story and Ulli Lommel’s classic 1980 film—has long haunted art, literature and film. Ghenie transposes the mythical, spectral monster who preys on disobedient children into a Magritte-esque Everyman. His gaze is directed towards a second figure—a cipher for the artist—who sits in a large yellow armchair with his back to the viewer. The room emerges like a fragment of memory, as solid walls give way to abstract swathes and flicks of paint which don’t quite reach the edges of the vast canvas. Ghenie was born in Romania in 1977 and grew up under the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu: an echo of that repression is felt in the sense of surveillance which shrouds the uncanny scene. Part of a cycle of works first exhibited collectively and titled The Visitation, the present work draws on both historical events and the history of art to evoke a rich intertextual tableau. Boogeyman dates to a seminal period in Ghenie’s career, executed the year following his first solo museum exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest.
Ghenie painted The Visitation cycle shortly following his completion of The Dada Room, the first of his celebrated ‘room within a room’ installations, now held in the collection of Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent. Mining the eerie annals of art history, The Dada Room looked to images of the First International Dada Fair, held in 1920 in the Berlin gallery of Dr. Otto Burchard. Ghenie, who lives and works in Berlin, conflated the exhibition space with that of the artist’s studio, sketching and daubing paint directly onto the walls in an effect reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s fabled, paint-encrusted studio. Like an artistic palimpsest, Boogeyman appears in conversation with The Dada Room, the latter’s hovering, uniformed mannequin—itself a reprisal of John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s Prussian Archangel, similarly suspended in the 1920 exhibition—transposed into the Boogeyman’s lurking, suited figure. Likewise, the two armchairs which furnished The Dada Room have been replaced by two matching yellow models, copied from a 1980s German furniture catalogue ordered by Ghenie’s mother. Layering found images and his own pictorial archive, in Boogeyman Ghenie engages with the history of representation to present a vital new visual idiom.
The quivering surfaces of Ghenie’s paintings reveal his concern with the construction of images, and the aesthetic language of many of his works from this time is indebted to the use of preparatory collages. Boogeyman’s collage study both clarifies and distorts the details of the scene, revealing a nebulous figure who stands cloaked in darkness in front of the artist, the sheen of his suit emerging from the half-light. This is not the biblical visitation of good news but its shadowy opposite. In the painting, Ghenie maintained a collage-like sensibility, carefully layering form, color and texture to create a dynamic, mesmeric surface. In places, masking tape was used to layer paint on paint, later pulled back to reveal crisp edges, like those of cut paper. Like Gerhard Richter, Ghenie scraped paint across the canvas to create blurred distortions, interrupting and semi-veiling the surface of the image. These abstract passages flicker like the glitching, fragmented warp of a weak television signal, bursting across the canvas in electric, neon hues.
As a student at the art academy in his native Cluj, Ghenie’s teachers were abstract painters enamored with the gestural canvases of American Abstract Expressionism. Privately, Ghenie was drawn to a more traditional academic lineage, and worked from textbooks to make copies of paintings by Rembrandt and Titian. He was inspired by the latter’s building up of the picture plane through thin, semi-transparent layers, conscious of how an underlayer of one pigment could act like a lightbox, altering the color of the upper layer. Ghenie employed a similar technique in Boogeyman, whose shifting, layered images emerge and dissolve into abstraction as the eye roams the vast canvas. It bursts into numinous, Rothko-like pools of color, with deep, twilight tones of blue and purple giving way to brilliant flashes of pink, orange, and teal. Paint comes alive, spreading gesturally towards the edges of the canvas—which it cannot quite reach—and threatening to subsume the very illusion it has revealed.
In Ghenie’s painting, the extra wide format, dramatic play of light and shadow, and immersive, film-like perspective imparts a distinctly cinematic quality. Ghenie is particularly inspired by David Lynch, whose series Twin Peaks aired on Romanian television in the early 1990s and was formative for Ghenie’s later practice. “I think consciously and unconsciously I want to master in painting what Lynch has done in cinema,” he later reflected. “It was with Lynch that I started to build the visual language of my paintings” (A. Ghenie in conversation with S. Riolo, “Adrian Ghenie, Pie Eater,” in Art in America, October 2, 2010, online, accessed 4 October 2025). Along with the scene itself, the head of the suited Boogeyman in Ghenie’s painting threatens to dissolve into abstraction, like the nightmarish, screaming heads of Francis Bacon. Drawing the viewer into a visual reverie, with Boogeyman the artist delights in the history and artifice of painting. Concerned above all with the “texture of history,” it was visceral works such as this which established Ghenie as one of the leading painters of his generation, revealing the dark currents which pulse through collective memory (A. Ghenie quoted in “Adrian Ghenie in Conversation with Magda Radu,” in Adrian Ghenie: Darwin’s Room, exh. cat. Romanian Pavilion, Biennale de Venezia, 2015, p. 29).
The protagonist of Adrian Ghenie’s Boogeyman (2010) hovers ominously at the edge of a monumental canvas more than three meters in width. From folklore to modern horror, the elusive, eldritch Boogeyman—muse of Goya’s Los Caprichos, villain of Stephen King’s short story and Ulli Lommel’s classic 1980 film—has long haunted art, literature and film. Ghenie transposes the mythical, spectral monster who preys on disobedient children into a Magritte-esque Everyman. His gaze is directed towards a second figure—a cipher for the artist—who sits in a large yellow armchair with his back to the viewer. The room emerges like a fragment of memory, as solid walls give way to abstract swathes and flicks of paint which don’t quite reach the edges of the vast canvas. Ghenie was born in Romania in 1977 and grew up under the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu: an echo of that repression is felt in the sense of surveillance which shrouds the uncanny scene. Part of a cycle of works first exhibited collectively and titled The Visitation, the present work draws on both historical events and the history of art to evoke a rich intertextual tableau. Boogeyman dates to a seminal period in Ghenie’s career, executed the year following his first solo museum exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest.
Ghenie painted The Visitation cycle shortly following his completion of The Dada Room, the first of his celebrated ‘room within a room’ installations, now held in the collection of Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent. Mining the eerie annals of art history, The Dada Room looked to images of the First International Dada Fair, held in 1920 in the Berlin gallery of Dr. Otto Burchard. Ghenie, who lives and works in Berlin, conflated the exhibition space with that of the artist’s studio, sketching and daubing paint directly onto the walls in an effect reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s fabled, paint-encrusted studio. Like an artistic palimpsest, Boogeyman appears in conversation with The Dada Room, the latter’s hovering, uniformed mannequin—itself a reprisal of John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s Prussian Archangel, similarly suspended in the 1920 exhibition—transposed into the Boogeyman’s lurking, suited figure. Likewise, the two armchairs which furnished The Dada Room have been replaced by two matching yellow models, copied from a 1980s German furniture catalogue ordered by Ghenie’s mother. Layering found images and his own pictorial archive, in Boogeyman Ghenie engages with the history of representation to present a vital new visual idiom.
The quivering surfaces of Ghenie’s paintings reveal his concern with the construction of images, and the aesthetic language of many of his works from this time is indebted to the use of preparatory collages. Boogeyman’s collage study both clarifies and distorts the details of the scene, revealing a nebulous figure who stands cloaked in darkness in front of the artist, the sheen of his suit emerging from the half-light. This is not the biblical visitation of good news but its shadowy opposite. In the painting, Ghenie maintained a collage-like sensibility, carefully layering form, color and texture to create a dynamic, mesmeric surface. In places, masking tape was used to layer paint on paint, later pulled back to reveal crisp edges, like those of cut paper. Like Gerhard Richter, Ghenie scraped paint across the canvas to create blurred distortions, interrupting and semi-veiling the surface of the image. These abstract passages flicker like the glitching, fragmented warp of a weak television signal, bursting across the canvas in electric, neon hues.
As a student at the art academy in his native Cluj, Ghenie’s teachers were abstract painters enamored with the gestural canvases of American Abstract Expressionism. Privately, Ghenie was drawn to a more traditional academic lineage, and worked from textbooks to make copies of paintings by Rembrandt and Titian. He was inspired by the latter’s building up of the picture plane through thin, semi-transparent layers, conscious of how an underlayer of one pigment could act like a lightbox, altering the color of the upper layer. Ghenie employed a similar technique in Boogeyman, whose shifting, layered images emerge and dissolve into abstraction as the eye roams the vast canvas. It bursts into numinous, Rothko-like pools of color, with deep, twilight tones of blue and purple giving way to brilliant flashes of pink, orange, and teal. Paint comes alive, spreading gesturally towards the edges of the canvas—which it cannot quite reach—and threatening to subsume the very illusion it has revealed.
In Ghenie’s painting, the extra wide format, dramatic play of light and shadow, and immersive, film-like perspective imparts a distinctly cinematic quality. Ghenie is particularly inspired by David Lynch, whose series Twin Peaks aired on Romanian television in the early 1990s and was formative for Ghenie’s later practice. “I think consciously and unconsciously I want to master in painting what Lynch has done in cinema,” he later reflected. “It was with Lynch that I started to build the visual language of my paintings” (A. Ghenie in conversation with S. Riolo, “Adrian Ghenie, Pie Eater,” in Art in America, October 2, 2010, online, accessed 4 October 2025). Along with the scene itself, the head of the suited Boogeyman in Ghenie’s painting threatens to dissolve into abstraction, like the nightmarish, screaming heads of Francis Bacon. Drawing the viewer into a visual reverie, with Boogeyman the artist delights in the history and artifice of painting. Concerned above all with the “texture of history,” it was visceral works such as this which established Ghenie as one of the leading painters of his generation, revealing the dark currents which pulse through collective memory (A. Ghenie quoted in “Adrian Ghenie in Conversation with Magda Radu,” in Adrian Ghenie: Darwin’s Room, exh. cat. Romanian Pavilion, Biennale de Venezia, 2015, p. 29).