Adrian Ghenie

Since the publication of his first monograph in 2009, Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie (born 1977) has established himself on both sides of the Atlantic as a preeminent painter of his generation, with his brutal canvases of faces slashed at, blurred, gnawed and erased. Ghenie intensifies the raw scream of Francis Bacon’s paintings to an even greater pitch, revisiting the Holocaust (as in one famous painting of Josef Mengele) and extending Bacon’s idiom of existential horror vividly into the present. Last year, his work featured in several museum exhibitions, including his first solo U.S. museum show at the MCA Denver and SFMoMA’s seminal group exhibition Six Lines of Flight. In March 2013, Pace Gallery presented his critically acclaimed New York debut. While Ghenie continues to explore the darker moments in European history, social and political abuses of power, as well as his personal history, his compositions have become conspicuously more complex over the years, as he has turned increasingly toward a brighter and more colorful palette, confidently shifting between figuration and abstraction. This book unites 80 of Ghenie’s key works from the past four years.