Shadow Paintings: Lost paintings in a new incarnation

Around a quarter of Egon Schiele's (1890-1918) paintings are still untraceable or have been destroyed. The circumstances of their disappearance are unknown in most cases, and the works themselves have only survived in black and white photographs. Based on an idea by Ciprian Adrian Barsan, one of the co-curators of the exhibition, the Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie (*1977) was inspired by the photographs to create new paintings. »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«, the artist explains the project, which can be seen in the exhibition Adrian Ghenie. Schattenbilder (Shadow Paintings) exhibition. The show runs from October 11, 2024 to February 9, 2025 at the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.

Adrian Ghenie does not create his paintings with traditional tools such as brushes, but uses stencils and painting knives. His works straddle the boundary between reality and abstraction and explore how people construct reality around themselves, sometimes unconsciously. The events of the chaotic and revolutionary 20th century are Ghenie's source of inspiration; he describes it as the »century of humiliation«. Ghenie's paintings can be found in many renowned museum collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.