PARIS.- Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac announced it now represents Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977 in Baia Mare, Romania) who lives and works between Cluj and Berlin.

Adrian Ghenie’s work portrays a climatic fusion between abstraction and figuration that seeks to place the viewer within the boundaries of history and identity. Growing up in post-Ceausescu Romania shaped Ghenie’s work and has had a profound effect on the subject of his painting. In the broader sense, Ghenie unearths the texture that does not appear in the existing images of history, vividly capturing the trauma and complexity that can be found in specific sensitive moments. From the history of cinema to the darker extremist incidents that shattered the twentieth-century, he draws upon a broad spectrum of events within his paintings. Within these selected moments, Ghenie is most intrigued by the differences that occur between fact and memory, exploring the simultaneous notions of blurred recollection and lucid detail through the means of texture. He treats his subjects as if they were archetypes, channeling the idea of collective memory rather than the personal recollection of events. In this way, he evokes the confusion between the obscure and the crystal clear through his gestural employment of paint that is in itself unconventional in application. These “staged accidents”, as Ghenie calls them, are carved into and onto his multi-layered painted canvases by his tools of choice; the palette knives and stencils that he favours over the traditional paintbrush.

Adrian Ghenie will have a solo exhibition featuring new paintings opening in our Paris Marais gallery on 22 October 2015. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication.

Ghenie’s recent solo museum exhibitions include Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga (2015); Museum for Contemporary Art, Denver (2012); S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent (2010); and The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2009). Past group exhibitions include MAC Belfast (2015); SFMoMA (2012); Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2012); Kunsthalle Mücsarnok, Budapest (2012); Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Bergamo (2010); and the Liverpool Biennial (2008).

Ghenie’s work is represented in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, SFMOMA and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Adrian Ghenie will represent Romania at the 56th Venice Biennale.