Adrian Ghenie is an acclaimed contemporary expressionist painter whose work, through the juxtaposition of personal memory and collective trauma, investigates the violent aspects of recent European and world history. His practice engages with the history of painting as well as with actual historical events, often taking as its subject the people whose actions have defined the course of history, whether as heroes or antiheroes. The formal expansion of the possibilities of the medium is always a central interest in Ghenie’s painting, and by the merging of grand narratives of historical painting with contemporary forms, his art becomes less about the analysis of the subject matter and more about the process of painting itself. Adrian Ghenie’s work has been presented in many international solo and group exhibitions at, for example, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; the Palazzo Cini, Venice; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the François Pinault Foundation, Venice (Palazzo Grassi); Tate Liverpool; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Venice Biennale, and others.

Most of the situations that appear in the works of Adrian Ghenie are a mixture of relations between human beings, particular events from recent history, and occurrences in the entertainment industry. Ghenie conveys through his paintings a precise awareness of society and political conditions. The scenes he stages in his paintings are always stretched between the private and the public, which suggests that people are often exposed to historical violence, compounded by their own vulnerability. These scenes effectively represent socio-political realities and human behaviour, while at the same time functioning as a position from which the artist can watch or be watched.