With 28 works displayed in the Column Hall of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie celebrates Egon Schiele contemporaneity, starting from his lost works. The exhibition Adrian Ghenie – Shadow Images is curated by Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Ciprian Adrian Barsan and will be on display until March 2nd, 2025.
VIENNA – Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie pays homage to Egon Schiele, not from a philological point of view, artistically speaking, but by adopting the lens of the interest and obsession that Austrian painter had with the image and the way he transformed himself into an image, stylizing himself into a kind of mark on paper by contorting his body, blurring his gender identity and slipping into new identity with paint and pencil. For Ghenie, this dialogue with Schiele is a starting point to reflect on contemporary image culture and its spectacularization.
At the root of the project is the idea of bringing back to life Schiele’s lost works, those which are still missing or are known to have been lost or destroyed, mostly before the Second World War. The exact circumstances of their disappearance still remain a mystery. These lost images, which revolved around weighty themes such as death, sexuality, self-reflection, the search for identity, distortion, melancholy and faith, exist today only as blurred photographs. Schiele’s works were the inspiration for this dialogue, which is not an imitation. Distortion, melancholy and faith are still part of Ghenie’s reflection, but his figures are hybrids – fleshly and technological at the same time, often deliberately depicted as monstrous and drastic.
As Ghenie explains, “Schiele was of course part of my intellectual archive, not in terms of style, but in terms of attitude. With Schiele, I share an interest in deformation and stretching the human form and playfully experimenting with it. Deformation was a solution to representation, but also an expression of the freedom that came with modernism. Once the traditional constraints of anatomy were abandoned, the manner of deformation could become a portrait of character or the inner psyche on a deeper level. This play with the human form marked the beginning of something new”.
SCHIELE’S HERITAGE
At the beginning of the 20th century, when Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was taking his first steps on the Viennese painting scene, the abyss theorised by Friedrich Nietzsche a few years earlier was materialising beneath the certainties of a Europe in full decay. And he was one of the most acute observers of this spiritual malaise, through his expressionist painting, which managed to capture the individual’s inner suffering by distorting the data of reality, guiding the brush into the meanders of the psyche, making the pictorial line an amplification and metaphor of the feelings, sensations, impulses, typical of the human being. Many of his works are characterised by a deep spirituality, where the presence of death and the constant alternation between becoming, being, and dying, give a measure of his tormented interiority. A mirror of a difficult and painful era of transition, between the last glimmers of the Belle Époque and the Great War, when blind faith in science and technology uprooted Europe’s thousand-year-old rural civilisation and paved the way for a disruptive modernity; customs and traditions rooted for centuries began to die out, the city took over the countryside, industrialisation created the working class and the social discomfort of the suburbs, the greater availability of weapons strengthened nationalism and opened the way to war.
In the same way, Adrian Gheniesurveys and subverts historical and artistic narratives through his paintings, which aim to unearth feelings of vulnerability, frustration or desire and often draw on human experience and ideas of the collective unconscious.
Naturalism and reality lose their importance in favour of translating the psychological state of the subject into images, linking Ghenie’s work with the studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, who were already at the centre of Schiele’s interest. However, as Ghenie himself declared in an interview with Marta Gnyp, when it comes to trying to analyse and explain oneself, “ one cannot change anything. No matter how hard you try, it will only add more to the irrational explanations. They consider everything but honest, altruistic purposes”. But this is no reason why art should stop trying to explore human consciousness.
Schiele was of course part of my intellectual archive, not in terms of style, but in terms of attitude. With Schiele, I share an interest in deformation and stretching the human form and playfully experimenting with it. Deformation was a solution to representation, but also an expression of the freedom that came with modernism.
ADRIAN GHENIE AND EGON SCHIELE
Ghenie’s work is like a Jungian dream, which is not necessarily bad or good, but in which the artist “simply” investigates the dark side of history with its paradoxes, and therefore dives into a collective subconsciousness that already exists and is strange and paradoxical, with no clear direction. Ghenie is also aware of the power of technology. He knows that nowadays it is almost more important how a work of art looks on a mobile phone screen than in a museum. Schiele was mostly interested in self-portraits, and Ghenie has noticed that his body language is the closest to contemporary body language as it appears on social media. Following this idea, Ghenie does not depict deformed bodies, but rather paints personalities marked by abysses. These paintings, whose colours are very much reminiscent of the flesh, are linked to Schiele’s work by the motif of a twisted, disfigured body, leaving anatomical reality behind.
As Ciprian Adrian Barsan explains, “Schiele’s unflinching figures, frozen in painfully intimate poses, reflect the grotesque exhibitionism of our age, in which the self is curated, edited, and consumed by an audience that never truly sees. We, like Schiele’s subjects, stand naked before the world, revealing our authenticity, reduced to the sum of our desires and fears. His art foresaw this descent into voyeurism, this blurring of the boundary between private and public, where even the most intimate gesture becomes part of the relentless performance of identity. The alienation, which Schiele captured with such searing intensity, has become the defining characteristic of our hyper-connected world. We are seen by all, yet truly known by none. Social media, that great deceiver, promises exposure but delivers only isolation. In Schiele’s fragmented, isolated figures, we recognize ourselves: constantly exposed yet forever hidden behind the masks we wear for the world’s gaze”.
SHADOW IMAGES
Schiele’s lost works return to metaphysical new light and life, but Ghenie does more than merely replicating them as he undertakes the challenging task of not only resurrecting these works from the shadow world but also physically re-embodying and reviving them. The idea here is to refrain from physically replicating Schiele’s own shadows and instead providing their deeper essence with a new, impossible embodiment. In this new series of works, the focus is on the human body and existence as such. It offers scope for interpretations that go far beyond the physical, diving into the transcendental. This process leads to a deeper reflection on the true nature of perception and how we construct and deconstruct reality. Schiele himself used the human body as a medium to convey far-reaching emotional and psychological states and to pose questions about human existence, sexuality, death and spirituality.
In this new series of works, the focus is on the human body and existence as such.
Large size works such as Resurrection 1, World Melancholy 1 or Kneeling Nude with Raised Hands 1 are disturbing reflections on a society that is facing the same crisis as at the beginning of the 20th century, with the spectrums of war and technological progress.
The setup of the exhibition helps to create the right atmosphere to frame the artworks: the floor of Column Hall is clad in stainless steel and the historical columns have been smoothly panelled, so that the “white cube” space exalts the violent colours of the fleshy bodies and their sculptural materiality.
