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29/4/2014

Adrian Ghenie

Galerie Judin, Berlin

Berlin Noir, the title of Adrian Ghenie’s third solo exhi­bi­tion at Gallery Judin, is a ref­er­ence to British author Philip Kerr’s pop­u­lar tril­ogy of crime nov­els, in which his protagonist Bernhard Gunther, a pri­vate eye in 1930’s Berlin, plumbs the uncharted abysses of the human soul. And indeed, in some of the works in this exhi­bi­tion—con­sist­ing of nine paint­ings and one large-format work on paper—we encounter the sin­is­ter schemes of the Nazis and their hench­men. Other works seem to, at least at first glance, have stumbled into the wrong century. The choice of motifs for the exhi­bi­tion appears to be, mildly put, extremely het­ero­ge­neous. But those who have fol­lowed Ghenie’s breathtaking devel­op­ment since his first exhi­bi­tions in 2006 are unlikely to be confused by this tactic of telling sto­ries through history, and from unexpected per­spec­tives.

Berlin plays a spe­cial role in Adrian Ghenie’s life. In 2011 he finally made this city his home, both per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally, after hav­ing worked here on and off for the last sev­eral years. Unlike many other artists, who appre­ciate Berlin for its low costs of liv­ing and the all-per­va­sive sense of excite­ment and inno­va­tion, Ghenie is attracted to its past. He calls it “the extra layer that this city has”, by which he is refer­ring not only to its historic­ity and the vis­i­ble traces of a century that brought this city, more than any other, its great­est triumphs and the most unfath­omable suffer­ing imag­in­able. Com­ing from Eastern Europe, he feels that Ger­mans “under­stand” him, feels some kind of kin­ship rooted in a shared expe­r­i­ence of dictator­ship and a sense of col­lec­tive tragedy. Most of all, Ghenie is fas­cinated by the fact that Ger­many, alone among the great centers of west­ern cul­ture had once renounced civ­i­liza­tion, and instead turned to a mod­ern form of barbarism. A people that at one time had produced painters such as Dürer and Friedrich, in the 20th century Ger­mans were elim­inat­ing parts of the museum col­lec­tions, and uni­ver­sity pro­fessors were encour­ag­ing their stu­dents to burn books by Kästner, Freud and Tucholsky.

The images of those ecstatic stu­dents chant­ing their songs in the eerie glow of the pyres of burn­ing books on the square in front of Berlin’s Humboldt Uni­ver­sity, are the point of depar­ture for Ghenie’s engage­ment with this orig­inal sin of Ger­man cultural history. The paint­ing Opernplatz (2014—like all the paint­ings in the exhi­bi­tion) shows a bird’s eye view of what is today Bebelplatz, surrounded by the Staatsoper, Uni­ver­sity and St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. It is not, how­ever, the book-burn­ing that dom­inates the paint­ing’s com­po­si­tion, but rather a dramatic sky with storm clouds and an overcast full moon. On the evening of the 10th of May 1937, it was pelt­ing down rain in Berlin, such that the piled-up books could not be set ablaze but with the help of petrol. There was thus no celes­tial help in this “fight against all that is Un-Ger­man”, and this is what Ghenie might have had in mind when he painted this sky. The com­po­si­tion is rem­i­nis­cent of the famous “Alexan­der­schlacht” (1592) by Ger­man renais­sance Mas­ter Albrecht Altdorfer, in whose dramatic sky a ris­ing sun symbol­izes the just triumph of the (good) Greeks over the (barbaric) Per­sians. In an inverted para­phrase thereof, the bleak moon over the Opernplatz is shin­ing a light on a new breed of barbar­ians.

The much smaller Burn­ing Books describes the same event from the more conven­tional per­spec­tive of an eye-wit­ness. Face­less onlook­ers are stand­ing around the fire, burn­ing paper swirling through the air. It is one of those moments in history that have, by way of black-and-white photog­ra­phy, indeli­bly etched them­selves into our col­lec­tive mem­o­ries. Ren­der­ing this barbarous act in color, the artist becomes capa­ble of stripping away the sooth­ing sense of tem­po­ral dis­tance, thus giv­ing the event an almost con­tem­po­rary char­ac­ter.

Less famous than the pub­lic burn­ing of “Un-Ger­man lit­er­a­ture” is the destruc­tion of those pie­ces of “degen­er­ate art” that could not be sold off on interna­tional mar­kets, which took place on the 20th of March 1939 in the yard of the fire sta­tion Lin­dens­traße in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Esti­mates vary between sources, but it is safe to assume that some 20.​000 works of art were destroyed. For a painter, this is of course an even more unbear­able thought than the burn­ing of books, given the fact that most of them were irreplace­able orig­inals. Vin­cent Van Gogh, at the be­gin­ning of the 1930s already well-rep­re­sented in Ger­many’s pri­vate and pub­lic col­lec­tions, was also des­ignated a “degen­er­ate” artist, but luck­ily his paint­ings were already very valu­able, and could thus escape destruc­tion. For the small-format por­trait of Van Gogh, Degen­er­ate Art, Ghenie once again draws on his collage-technique, in order to achieve a decon­struc­tivist com­po­si­tion of the image. The face is lit­er­ally com­posed of ani­mal parts—bits of fur, fish bellies, flaps of skin—as is clearly vis­i­ble in studies for this paint­ing.

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