At the Venice Art Biennale 2015, the Romanian Pavilion in the Giardini showcases Darwin’s Room, an exhibition of recent paintings by Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977), curated by Mihai Pop. The title refers not only to a series of portraits (and self-portraits in the guise) of the great British naturalist, but also to Ghenie’s exploration of twentieth-century history as an expanded »laboratory of evolution,« with seminal ideas fighting for survival and domination as part of an allegorical interweaving of past and future histories. The conceptual construct behind the exhibition as a whole is based on the artist’s vision of the contemporary world, defined by memory and desire, upheaval and spectacle.

The Romanian Pavilion, curated by Mihai Pop, showcases Darwin’s Room, a selection of paintings organized across three rooms – according to the initial interior architecture of the Pavilion (from 1938) – and comprises a specific theme for each of these rooms: The Tempest, The Portrait Gallery (Self-portrait as Charles Darwin), and The Dissonances of History.

Expanding upon Darwin’s ‘laboratory’, Ghenie proposes an interpretive path into the notion of survival. He reads into the theory of biological evolutionism and the ways it has been skewed to transform societies. He also draws upon other historical sources in his updating of this image (fundamental to our self-perception), ‘contaminating’ it with a keen reflection on neoliberal competitiveness, extending across all areas and folds of social and affective life. Darwin’s studio broadens its scope and becomes an incubator where future ideas grow and develop. It is an interweaving of past and future histories that does not hold proof or speculation on species evolution, which neither distorts nor idealizes, but opens a path towards a reformulation of the social values that structure contemporary existence. To equal extents, this returns to an essential moment, when epistemological tables were turned, and uses Darwin’s scientific tabula rasa to project or inscribe a new image of our future.

Gazing into the future is premised on revisiting the past with a lucid eye, parsing through myths that accreted as foundation for the writing of history, of the fictions that define nations, of the fabricated narratives that fragment history into centres and peripheries, occupied respectively by winners and losers.

Biography
Adrian Ghenie (born 13 August 1977, Baia Mare) is a contemporary Romanian painter. The son of a dentist, he studied fine arts at the Arts and Crafts School in Baia Mare between 1991 and 1994.
He is a graduate of the Art and Design University of Cluj-Napoca (2001).

Ghenie lives and works in Cluj, Berlin, and London. In 2005, he co-founded Galeria Plan B in Cluj, together with Mihai Pop, a production and exhibition space for contemporary art. In 2008 Plan B opened a permanent exhibition space in Berlin.

His work has been widely exhibited in group and solo exhibitions, including at Tate Liverpool, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

In June 2014 the oil on canvas painting “The Fake Rothko” was sold for £1,426,000 ($2,428,140).

In February 2016, the large oil on canvas painting “The Sunflowers of 1937” inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s famous “Sunflowers” was sold in London for £3,177,000 at a Sotheby’s auction, marking it the most expensive painting sold by the Romanian artist.

Before the auction, the value of the painting was estimated between £400,000 and £600,000. It belonged to the Galerie Judin of Berlin, who had purchased it from the artist.

Collections
Ghenie’s work is represented in numerous major museum and public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent.

Style and technique
Adrian Ghenie belongs to a generation that has demonstrated its ability to lucidly reflect upon the difficult and often traumatic underpinningsof local histories.The use of a nuanced examination of how the contemporary is shaped by memory and desire, convulsion and spectacle, plays a central part in his work. Ghenie is, alongside other remarkable representatives of the same artistic community, one of the founders of the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj, which brings together some of the most dynamic artistic initiatives in Romania.

Ghenie does not use traditional tools of the painter or brushes, but a palette knife and stencils. He paints portraits of 20th century figures, particularly those associated with genocide and mass suffering, that appear in his work gnawed and slashed, blurred and speckled.

His painterly style has been compared to that of Francis Bacon.

Exhibitions
Previous solo exhibitions include: Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga (2015); Golems, Pace Gallery, London (2014); On the Road to… Tarascon, Plan B, Berlin (2013, with Navid Nuur); Pie-Fights and Pathos, Museum for Contemporary Art, Denver (2012); S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent (2010); and The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2009). Previous group exhibitions include: I Will Go There, Take Me Home, MAC Belfast (2015); Six Lines of Flight, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012); Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2012); European Travellers: Art from Cluj Today, Kunsthalle Mücsarnok, Budapest (2012); The Crystal Hypothesis, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Bergamo (2010); and the Liverpool Biennial (2008). The artist lives and works in Cluj and Berlin.

Highlights

Darwin and the Satyr (2014)
Imagined within a tempestuous atmosphere,Darwin and the Satyr (2014) sets in opposition the world’s need for the irrational, embodied in the esoteric figure of the satyr (comparable with those found in old alchemical treatises), on the one hand, and the figure of the great scientist, on the other. The image has not been selected from the repertoire of the explicable, but rather we are confronted with an oneiric amalgamation of two opposing worlds.

The Storm (2015)
The sequence of the Darwin’s Room exhibition is punctuated by three sub-themes that lend nuance to the development of the curatorial concept. The core rests under the sign of The Tempest as a metaphor for the disquietude of subterranean history. It is a journey through realms replete with obscurity and enlightenment, whose elements are linked by a »syncretism of primordial fears, as they manifested themselves in the primitive religions—fear of tempests, lightning, death« (Marcel Brion).

Burning Bush (2014)

Opernplatz (2014)
Opernplatz (2014) recreates the saturnalian atmosphere in which the Nazis burned around twenty-five thousand books on the night of 10 May 1933—an intense image of twentieth-century history, of ideological purification. In the image, the cloudy sky becomes an active element of history: the unexpected storm hindered the burning of the books in the public square.

Black Flag (2015)
Black Flag (2015) is one of the works in which the theme of history is summed up by the raising of a black flag, an abstract commemoration. It can be transposed upon any traumatic context functioning within a relationship of familiarity and alienation relative to the chromatics of the painting, which are theoretically impossible from a pictorial point of view— between the dominants of white and red.

Carnivorous Flowers (2014)
Carnivorous Flowers (2014) portrays Josef Mengele and the murky story of his flight to South America. His relocation to a space in which history would otherwise not have placed him becomes the pretext for a work about hypocrisy and the failure of the idea of justice, to be found in history’s subterranean reaches.

Persian Miniature (2013)
Conceived as one of the exhibition’s centrepieces, Persian Miniature (2013) is a work in which the finesse of the miniature is transposed on a monumental scale using the pictorial means of abstract expressionism. The work speaks of the encounter with the wild beast in the troubling space of the forest, about the anxiety of
the encounter with »the other.«

Untitled (2012)
Portrait Gallery surveys a number of emblematic figures of recent history, imagined within an irrational transformation, as if merging with nature itself, reverting to the typology of the »species.«

Turning Blue (2008)
The portraits of Hitler (Untitled, 2012) and Lenin (Turning Blue, 2008) are »consecrated« portraits of the monstrous, but in painting them Ghenie places himself in opposition to the propaganda images that generated them. Where the propaganda image is purified and idealised, Ghenie seems to overload his historical figures with pictorial matter in an attempt to convey their true nature through gesture, colour and pictorial accident.

Charles Darwin at the Age of 40 (2014)
Charles Darwin at the Age of 40 (2014) and Charles Darwin as a Young Man (2014) are representations of the scientist betrayed by his own body. The great naturalist is wracked by illness, laid low by the biology of his own body, thereby becoming a romantic figure, a spirit shackled inside a fragile carcass.

Charles Darwin as a Young Man (2014)

Study for Self-portrait as Charles Darwin (2013)
In Study for Self-portrait as Charles Darwin (2014), by means of superimposition the artist identifies himself with a history that still provokes debate, and the superimposition itself resembles a eugenic process, the result of a genetic amelioration of the individual.

Charles Darwin as a Young Man (2013)

Pie Fight Study (2012)
In the works of the Pie Fight Study (2012) series, Ghenie returns to one of his recurrent sources, the cinema, namely the universal absurdity of The Battle of the Century (an anarchistic early-twentieth-century American film comedy). This series of works can be cited as a mise en abyme of collective humiliation.

Degenerate Art (2014)
In Degenerate Art (2014), in which the portrait of Van Gogh becomes an extension of landscape and the texture of nature, the history of art is viewed in relation to ideology, as the title suggests, and the surface of the painting thereby becomes an exercise in simulating—and implicitly understanding—that history.

Self-portrait as Vincent van Gogh (2012)
The third sub-theme is The Dissonances of History, a personal jigsaw puzzle of historical facts that are inexplicable from the standpoint of any connexion between arguments, actions and consequences; incongruent history, which diverts things in unexpected directions, resonates with the intimacy of Adrian Ghenie’s pictorial practice, and the final painting is the result of a process whereby pictorial accident is integrated into a narrative.

Duchamp’s Funeral II (2009)
Duchamp’s Funeral II (2009) is one of Adrian Ghenie’s best-known works. Here, the artist imagines the funeral of the father of conceptual art, with all the pomp of a state funeral for a (party) leader, establishing a symmetry between the two types of ideology: that of art and that of society.

Romanian pavilion
The Romanian pavilion houses Romania’s national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.

The pavilion was designed by Brenno Del Giudice in 1932 and built by 1938 as part of a complex on the Giardini’s Sant’Elena Island. The buildings, originally allocated to Sweden and Greece, were respectively transferred to Yugoslavia and Romania.

The interior was planned under the attention of Nicolae Iorga. It was initially designed as an art salon with three rooms (the main, tall show room being flanked by two smaller ones) and it stayed like that until 1962, when the walls were demolished, uniting the three rooms into one single salon. The initial architecture was recreated in 2015, albeit temporarily, by architect Attila Kim for Adrian Ghenie’s Darwin’s Room. Since 1997, the Romanian Institute for Culture and Research in Humanities (also known as Casa Romena di Venezia, based in Palazzo Correr) has hosted intermittently parallel exhibitions representing Romania at the Venice Biennale.

Venice Biennale 2015
The 2015 Art Biennale closes a sort of trilogy that began with the exhibition curated by Bice Curiger in 2011, Illuminations, and continued with the Encyclopedic Palace of Massimiliano Gioni (2013). With All The World’s Futures, La Biennale continues its research on useful references for making aesthetic judgments on contemporary art, a “critical” issue after the end of the avant-garde and “non-art” art.

Through the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, La Biennale returns to observe the relationship between art and the development of human, social and political reality, in the pressing of external forces and phenomena: the ways in which, that is, the tensions of the external world solicit the sensitivities, the vital and expressive energies of the artists, their desires, the motions of the soul (their inner song ).

La Biennale di Venezia was founded in 1895. Paolo Baratta has been its President since 2008, and before that from 1998 to 2001. La Biennale, who stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends, organizes exhibitions, festivals and researches in all its specific sectors: Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934). Its activities are documented at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) that recently has been completely renovated.

The relationship with the local community has been strengthened through Educational activities and guided visits, with the participation of a growing number of schools from the Veneto region and beyond. This spreads the creativity on the new generation (3,000 teachers and 30,000 pupils involved in 2014). These activities have been supported by the Venice Chamber of Commerce. A cooperation with Universities and research institutes making special tours and stays at the exhibitions has also been established. In the three years from 2012-2014, 227 universities (79 Italian and 148 international) have joined the Biennale Sessions project.

In all sectors there have been more research and production opportunities addressed to the younger generation of artists, directly in contact with renowned teachers; this has become more systematic and continuous through the international project Biennale College, now running in the Dance, Theatre, Music, and Cinema sections.