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拍品專文
‘What intrigued me about Van Gogh is this difference between the reality of his actual existence … and Van Gogh the cliché, which is a beautiful fantasy’ (Adrian Ghenie)
Adrian Ghenie’s fascination with Vincent Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888) has given rise to some of his most important paintings. The original is known only in reproduction: it was destroyed, or possibly looted, during the 1945 Allied bombings of Magdeburg, where it was held in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. Following in the footsteps of Francis Bacon, who paid homage to the work in his own series of the mid-1950s, Ghenie has repeatedly grappled with Van Gogh’s lost vision. Within a practice dedicated to exploring the way that the past lives within our collective consciousness, the concept of a self-portrait lost to the ravages of time holds particular fascination. Throughout his oeuvre, Ghenie has sought to rescue key historical moments and figures from the flat, glossy world of print and screen, re-materialising them in paint as living, breathing entities. His vivid responses to The Painter on the Road to Tarascon seek to strip away not only the romanticised fantasies associated with Van Gogh himself, but also to inject the original painting with a sense of its own lived history.
Van Gogh is one of a number of recurring subjects—from Charles Darwin to Elvis Presley—whom Ghenie believes to have changed the course of humanity. As a six-year-old, the artist kept a print of Sunflowers (1888) under his pillow. Later, he recalls being overwhelmed by the artist’s 1889 self-portrait in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, and would go on to paint himself multiple times in the image of his hero. Ghenie—who grew up in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist regime—was also particularly intrigued by the intersection of Van Gogh’s art with the stories of modern European history. In the 1930s, many of his paintings were seized as ‘degenerate art’ under the Nazi’s campaign to purge modern art from Germany. Ghenie explicitly evoked these events in his large-scale 2014 painting The Sunflowers in 1937, which reimagines the work burnt, warped and ruined by the ideological violence of the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, too, found itself wrenched into the machinations of the Second World War, the artist’s haunting self-image consigned once and for all to the pages of history.
Painted in 2013, and included in Ghenie’s solo exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga the following year, the present work brings these narratives to life. The sunny yellows of Van Gogh’s original are replaced by visceral swathes of black and piercing blue, marbled with jewel-like tones of purple and green. Paint drips and stutters down the length of the picture plane, every inch of its surface alive with tactile impasto. If Ghenie’s understanding of the painting was filtered through Bacon, here he adds another layer of remove by collaborating with the Iranian-born Dutch artist Navid Nuur. The two met through their mutual involvement with the Romanian gallery Plan B, and together produced a series of works that built upon Ghenie’s engagement with Van Gogh. In the present example, Nuur has added veils of brushwork inspired by the Dutch master over the top of Ghenie’s painting. The results evoke the build-up of distortion and interference that characterises our relationship with the past. In a powerful meditation on the workings of collective memory, Van Gogh becomes a shadowy, unreachable figure, his identity subsumed by history’s visual noise.
Adrian Ghenie’s fascination with Vincent Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888) has given rise to some of his most important paintings. The original is known only in reproduction: it was destroyed, or possibly looted, during the 1945 Allied bombings of Magdeburg, where it was held in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. Following in the footsteps of Francis Bacon, who paid homage to the work in his own series of the mid-1950s, Ghenie has repeatedly grappled with Van Gogh’s lost vision. Within a practice dedicated to exploring the way that the past lives within our collective consciousness, the concept of a self-portrait lost to the ravages of time holds particular fascination. Throughout his oeuvre, Ghenie has sought to rescue key historical moments and figures from the flat, glossy world of print and screen, re-materialising them in paint as living, breathing entities. His vivid responses to The Painter on the Road to Tarascon seek to strip away not only the romanticised fantasies associated with Van Gogh himself, but also to inject the original painting with a sense of its own lived history.
Van Gogh is one of a number of recurring subjects—from Charles Darwin to Elvis Presley—whom Ghenie believes to have changed the course of humanity. As a six-year-old, the artist kept a print of Sunflowers (1888) under his pillow. Later, he recalls being overwhelmed by the artist’s 1889 self-portrait in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, and would go on to paint himself multiple times in the image of his hero. Ghenie—who grew up in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist regime—was also particularly intrigued by the intersection of Van Gogh’s art with the stories of modern European history. In the 1930s, many of his paintings were seized as ‘degenerate art’ under the Nazi’s campaign to purge modern art from Germany. Ghenie explicitly evoked these events in his large-scale 2014 painting The Sunflowers in 1937, which reimagines the work burnt, warped and ruined by the ideological violence of the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, too, found itself wrenched into the machinations of the Second World War, the artist’s haunting self-image consigned once and for all to the pages of history.
Painted in 2013, and included in Ghenie’s solo exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga the following year, the present work brings these narratives to life. The sunny yellows of Van Gogh’s original are replaced by visceral swathes of black and piercing blue, marbled with jewel-like tones of purple and green. Paint drips and stutters down the length of the picture plane, every inch of its surface alive with tactile impasto. If Ghenie’s understanding of the painting was filtered through Bacon, here he adds another layer of remove by collaborating with the Iranian-born Dutch artist Navid Nuur. The two met through their mutual involvement with the Romanian gallery Plan B, and together produced a series of works that built upon Ghenie’s engagement with Van Gogh. In the present example, Nuur has added veils of brushwork inspired by the Dutch master over the top of Ghenie’s painting. The results evoke the build-up of distortion and interference that characterises our relationship with the past. In a powerful meditation on the workings of collective memory, Van Gogh becomes a shadowy, unreachable figure, his identity subsumed by history’s visual noise.