“Schiele but monstrous” was the brief, using the black and white photos of Schiele’s lost paintings as a starting point. Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie produced these paintings specially for the exhibition at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. I hadn’t heard of him before, but I was really impressed with his work. They’re also huge in real life.
“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)
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