The story of the contemporary painter Adrian Ghenie’s rise from art student in Cluj, Romania, to darling of international curators and auction houses over the course of barely a dozen years is not unprecedented: the art world loves to anoint young talent. It also likes to discard it, but Ghenie, with prodigious skill and the help of many hands along the way, has emerged as a more durable star, one whose work is now, for better or worse, seen as a desirable asset.

 

Ghenie, born in 1977 in Baia Mare, grapples with haunting and historical subjects. His alternately lush and vigorous style has earned him comparisons to Francis Bacon, although Ghenie says: “Despite people[‘s] belief Bacon was never a direct source of inspiration for me....At this point in my career, I do what I always did—I steal from everybody”. Meanwhile, his critical and commercial ascent has been speedy enough to attract attention, without tipping into overexposure.

 

Asked to explain Ghenie’s appeal, the UK independent curator Jane Neal says: “Adrian is an extremely talented painter and manages to engender the feeling of something rather than explicitly outlining exactly what it is. He’s adept at drawing from the past—be it key figures or events from history—but while doing this he simultaneously catapults his work and his canvases into the future by inventing something entirely new. It is never formulaic and always evolving.”

 

Neal’s 2006 group exhibition Cluj Connection—organised at the now-closed Haunch of Venison gallery in Zurich and centred on young painters from the city—was Ghenie’s stepping stone to a solo show, Shadow of a Daydream, at the gallery the following year. He racked up gallery exhibitions in short order, including a solo at the Tim Van Laere Gallery in Antwerp in 2008 and his first London outing, Darkness for an Hour, at Haunch of Venison in 2009. It was from this show that Christie’s (and Haunch of Venison) owner François Pinault, an early fan, bought the virtuoso two-part canvas Nickelodeon (2008) for approximately €60,000. In October 2016, the auction house sold Nickelodeon for an artist-record £7.1m (est. £1m-£1.5m), a price rise of 16,000%, triggering headlines for Ghenie and reaping a big payday for Pinault.

 

Can I buy it?

For those involved since the early days, Ghenie’s success comes as no surprise. Juerg Judin, the director of Haunch of Venison at that time who now shows the artist in his home base of Berlin, recalls Ghenie’s first solo show in Zurich. “People came to the opening, but nobody had ever heard his name and it was sold out in 20 minutes. People asked, ‘Who is this and can I buy it?’”

“He has an intellectual approach like a conceptual artist in what he’s doing and what he’s trying to tell,” Judin adds, “[but] he’s 100% a painter in the old-fashioned sense.”

The curator Gary Garrels first encountered Ghenie’s hybrid, cinematic style in a solo exhibition organised by dealer Mihai Nicodim at Chung King Project in Los Angeles in early 2007. “The paintings were small, very dark and brooding, and beautifully painted,” Garrels says. “They stood out for me from the get-go.” A few years later, Garrels, now the senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), was deeply impressed by The Trial (2010), a large-scale canvas depicting the 1989 proceedings against the fallen Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, which led to their immediate execution by firing squad. Ghenie and Nicodim offered to donate the work to SFMOMA, where it is now part of the permanent collection. “I was thrilled,” Garrels says. “We have a significant work by Gerhard Richter, so there is a context for Adrian in the collection.” He adds: “Unfortunately, it’s not possible for us to continue building his work into our collection now. It’s totally out of range for a museum.”