ADRIAN GHENIE IN CONVERSATION WITH KLAUS SPEIDEL

In Shadow Paintings, Adrian Ghenie brings Egon Schiele's lost works, which are only known through black and white photographs, back to life. These untraceable or destroyed paintings, which deal with themes such as death, sexuality and melancholy, are brought back to life by Ghenie, who dissolves the boundaries between reality and abstraction. The exhibition, which can be seen at the ALBERTINA in Vienna from 11 October 2024 to 9 February 2025, invites visitors on a metaphysical journey through decay and re-creation.

Adrian Ghenie, one of the most outstanding painters of his generation, scrutinises historical and artistic narratives and combines personal memories with art history. In conversation with Klaus Speidel, art theorist and curator, Ghenie talks about his path into painting, new orientations and his relationship to the work of Egon Schiele.

KLAUS SPEIDEL: I once read that you want the works to leave the studio quickly once they are done. How are you doing with them now?

ADRIAN GHENIE: The problem is that the more I look at them, the more I notice errors, things that I want to change. I think: “This is not nice, I would like to adjust this.” There is this inner conflict … Especially when you work like me, with a raw attitude. There is no polishing in it. So you do something and it has this rawness, and then you ask yourself: “Shall I polish it?” You want it to be the way it is, but there’s another instinct telling you that you should polish it. A sort of craft instinct. Every painter is a craftsperson. And you say to yourself: “Yeah, it came too quickly” or “It’s too rough” or “I have to polish it. Then I will show my craft.” But when you do, you ruin the liveliness?

KS: This seems to exemplify a tension between two more general instincts, one perhaps more modern, one more academic. You are someone who knows how to polish because you learned to paint more traditionally. I suppose that artists who lack this academic knowledge don’t have that problem. You have the skill set. That’s why you have the problem.

AG: I do. Now I try to be as quick as possible when I paint. I prepare a lot. I draw. I somehow try to make things clear in my head, but when I execute the work, I prefer to be quick. Because it then has this energy in it.

 

KS: Let’s talk about your way of painting before looking into the current project. I feel that there were some fundamental evolutions. On the Internet, you can find some paintings you did in the 1990s. Mountainscapes, for instance, or a picture of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna … They display a lot of skill in a traditional sense.

AG: Perhaps. But I just did these works because I had to sell something to survive. It was never something I was interested in. When painting such things back then, you never thought that they might surface, because the Internet was not really present yet. I didn’t think anyone would find them. And now everything done in the past is public. It’s online.

KS: Does this bother you a lot? 

AG: Honestly, I don’t care. Every artist has this fantasy of having a clean biography. Like: “I came out of almost nothing with this style.” In reality, we all have a lot of shitty painting behind us. 

KS: That’s true for all art, perhaps. In Charles Baudelaire’s Advice to Young Writers, the first sentence is something like: “Whenever someone says of a writer who becomes successful, ‘This was an impressive beginning,’ what they don’t see is that every beginning has always been preceded by, and is the effect of, twenty other beginnings they don’t know about.” And yet, people are very curious about these other beginnings. They are part of the mythology of artists and present in nearly every retrospective: “They experimented for a few years, and then they found themselves, and they started doing one thing. They got better at it, and then they got worse, and then they died.”

AG: I wonder if it will stay this way in the future. Probably not this type of clear development. But I still fit into the first category with this type of searching and then finding. I will probably become idiotic by the time I’m seventy—although it’s tricky, because, you know, if you think of the late Picasso or De Chirico, everybody thought what they did was completely idiotic, but it’s actually not, especially in De Chirico’s case.

KS: Sometimes these startling changes do not happen at the end, but somewhere in between you do something completely different like René Magritte.

AG: Maybe doing something like this is part of how you manufacture an idea of freedom as an artist. You need that sometimes. You have the instinct to do something that people reject from time to time, so you can affirm that you’re still deciding for yourself. 

KS: Can you tell me something about the relationship between your works and those of Egon Schiele?

AG: I didn’t look at Schiele a lot, to be honest. Because from the beginning, it was not about Schiele for me. Schiele of course was part of my mental archive, but I did not feel the need to go buy a book on Schiele and study him. It was not about that. The simple low-resolution printouts that you see here in the studio were enough. Yet I did feel that I have two things in common with Schiele. Not in terms of style, but in terms of attitude. First of all, he had this strong focus on self-portraits as a pretext to exploring the body. Basically, it turns out that every time I do a figure somewhere, it is me. Perhaps I’m just too lazy to actually find a model. In the end, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t look like me. The source is me. So there’s always this going back to the same silhouette and working with that. Secondly, I think something I have in common with him is this interest in deformation, elongation, this play with the human form. He was at the start of something new: suddenly, the anatomy was just a reference point and not the most important thing anymore. He would elongate, dilate, distort. Later, with Picasso and others, it became like a trademark of the twentieth century to play with that. And we still do that today when we paint a human figure. You can’t go back to this anatomy and naturalism. I feel it would somehow not be interesting. So we are probably doomed for a long time to play with this … they often call it “deconstruction,” even though the word is somehow boring to use, but it is something that Schiele started brilliantly.

KS: I would be very curious to hear what you think of distortion more generally. Is it a solution to a problem? And what’s the problem?

AG: Yes. First, it’s simply … a solution to a representation problem. We want to represent the human figure, but with 2,000 years of already brilliant results in the sense of anatomical correctness, it’s hard to go further in the same direction.

You can find the conversation between Adrian Ghenie and Klaus Speidel in full length in our publication Adrian Ghenie - Shadow Paintings. 

Headerbild Adrian Ghenie © Oliver Mark, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73630255