VIENNA.- Adrian Ghenie is honoring Egon Schiele, one of expressionism’s most important visual artists, with a revolutionary exhibition. Based on a concept originated by Ciprian Adrian Barsan, it envisions a return of Schiele’s lost works—known only from black and-white photographs—courtesy of Adrian Ghenie’s hauntingly emphatic artistic abilities.

Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie takes Schiele's lost works as an opportunity to embark on an impressive and unique search for traces with works created especially for this exhibition:

“Schiele was of course part of my intellectual archive, not in terms of style, but in terms of attitude. Together with Schiele, I share an interest in the deformation and stretching of the human form and playful experimentation with it. Deformation was a solution for representation, but also an expression of the freedom that came with modernism. Once you leave the traditional constraints of anatomy behind, the way you deform can 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.” --Adrian Ghenie

Immortal energy from lost works

Around one quarter of Schiele’s paintings remain missing to this day or are known to have been lost or destroyed, for the most part prior to the Second World War. The exact circumstances surrounding their disappearance are still a mystery. These lost images, which revolved around weighty themes such as death, sexuality, self reflection, the search for identity, distortion, melancholy, and faith, now exist only as shadowy photographs.

Ghenie assumes the challenging task of not only resurrecting these works from the shadow world but also of physically re-embodying and reviving them. The point here is to refrain from physically replicating Schiele’s own shadows and instead provide their deeper essence with a new, impossible embodiment.

The project “Shadow Paintings” takes viewers along on a metaphysical journey through dissolution and eventual reincarnation. The works referred to here as “Shadow Paintings” symbolize the dark night of the soul in which individuals find themselves confronted with their inner shadows—a process associated with concepts such as nigredo, tenebrosity, and melancholy.

Via his own deconstructive method, Adrian Ghenie lends these “Shadow Paintings” a new dimension that reaches far beyond mere form, transforming them into lively manifestations of the chromatic spectrum while also blurring the boundaries between reality and abstraction. In doing so, he strives not to follow a spiritual calling but rather to achieve a state of energetic euphoria. Ghenie creates “the impossible body” without anatomy—a reinvention of nothingness.

The human body as a medium

The emphasis in this new series of works is on the human body and on existence as such. It offers space for interpretations that range far beyond the physical, indeed diving into the transcendental. This process gives rise to deeper reflection upon the nature of perception itself and upon just how we construct and deconstruct reality. Schiele himself employed the human body as a medium via which to convey deep- reaching emotional and psychological states and pose questions as to human existence, sexuality, death, and spirituality.

Also the self-portrait is an essential component of Adrian Ghenie's entire oeuvre. It was his thematisation of himself as van Gogh or Darwin that prompted Adrian Barsan and me to ask the artist whether he would like to paint a cycle of Egon Schiele's lost paintings at the end of my 25 years as director of the Albertina. Adrian Ghenie accepted immediately.

This unique cycle of 14 paintings is now available: an echo of those paintings by Egon Schiele that have only survived as pale shadows, as colourless, black-grey silhouettes, which nevertheless contain Schiele's time: Vienna at the turn of the century, its culture, his penchant for psychology, for the aestheticisation of life in the Gesamtkunstwerk, his obsession with the unconscious, which pushes outwards in gestures, facial expressions and body language.

Obsessions with sexuality and its abysses. The discovery of early childhood sexuality. All this sounds like the echo of a bygone era in Adrian Ghenie's picture cycle: an echo thrown back from the walls of the culture of our own time. Schiele's lost pictures cast their shadow into our present. Adrian Ghenie materialises this shadow again, giving it back the colour, plasticity and fleshiness that the long-lost, destroyed, burnt, destroyed or stored in an unknown place paintings have lost in the course of time. However, this cycle of Ghenie's works, which emerged from this echo and shadow image, is not an image of the lost originals, not a copy, not a reconstruction. The echo does not sound exactly like the original sound of Schiele and his era.

Search of traces

The work of few artists is as complex as that of Adrian Ghenie. It refers both to his own biography and to the history of art. Ambiguity, including the oscillation between figuration and abstraction, is the central feature of Ghenie's art. Personal, mysterious, even occult experiences, which are reflected in the artist's visual world, are based as much on Ghenie's life as on the set of art-historical references.

Ghenie's imagination, which is fuelled by his own and collective memories, gives birth to monsters. His figures suffer from loss of face and physical deformities. The disfigured heads can only be inadequately explained psychologically by the influence of film stills showing the comic victims of pie fights in old slapstick comedies, however illuminating the reference to Ghenie's preference for this film genre of the silent film era may be.

The artist has always been attracted to horror and suspense. He loves Alfred Hitchcock's aesthetic of the uncanny. The atmosphere that characterises Ghenie's images is saturated with film noir. In recent years, Ghenie has only changed the method of painting: instead of collage and the use of photographs, he works solely with a brush and palette knife; a master of pure peinture.

Ciprian Adrian Barsan previously joined forces with the ALBERTINA Museum to realize the successful exhibition of works by Niko Pirosmani. This exhibition is likewise supported by Barsan’s Infinitart Foundation.

Curators: Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Ciprian Adrian Barsan (C.A.B.)