Until 25 Jul 2009

Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET; Tel. 020 7495 5050
Free admission. Opening hours: Mon/Tue/Wed/Fri 10.00-18.00; Thu 10.00-19.00, Sat 10.00-17.00.

Haunch of Venison is delighted to announce the first solo show in Britain by acclaimed young Romanian painter, Adrian Ghenie. The exhibition demonstrates Ghenie’s ongoing exploration of the medium of paint, and his enduring fascination with European history, addressed through ideas relating to memory, trauma and extremism.

The sources for Ghenie’s images are derived from a combination of his own memories and from historical books, archives and films. While Ghenie often engages with specific and emblematic images and moments in twentieth century history – the death of Stalin, the Hollywood comedy stars Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the art collection amassed by Herman Goering during the second World War, or the infamous Dada fair of 1920 Berlin – his paintings are never prescriptive but rather open to a multitude of possible interpretations.

Figurative imagery is buried within drips and pours of paint, scraped and weathered surfaces, which perhaps represent contrasting states of clarity, fluidity and erosion. Adrian Ghenie seems to suggest that history and memory are never fixed, but rather in flux. Much of his new work explores the phenomenon of Dada, as part of an ongoing investigation of a ‘history of extremism’ and displacement in the twentieth century. That many of the leading members of the Dada movement were exiled in America during the second World War, connects this new body of work to earlier themes in Ghenie’s oeuvre such as ‘The Flight into Egypt’. For example, his portrait of Marcel Duchamp renders the iconic artist as a blind old man, an abject, vagrant figure.

Adrian Ghenie (b.1977 Baia-Mare, Romania) graduated in 2001 from the University of Art and Design, Cluj (Romania), and lives and works in Cluj and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Nolan Judin and Plan B, Berlin (2008),Tim van Laere, Antwerp (2008) and Shadow of a Daydream, Haunch of Venison Zurich (2007-8). Important recent group exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial (2008), Prague Biennale (2007) and Haunch of Venison, Zurich (2006).

Ghenie has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art in Bucharest (2009) and SMAK, Ghent (2010). In London, he was present in a special Culture Power talk with curator Jane Neal, in November 2008, at the Ratiu Foundation.