Adrian Ghenie valuation
Romanian painter of smeared, scraped portraits and interiors haunted by the twentieth century's dictators and disasters.
Adrian Ghenie was born in Baia Mare, Romania, in 1977, the son of a dentist, and studied at the art school in Baia Mare and at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, graduating in 2001.
What a work by Adrian Ghenie is worth
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Bio
Adrian Ghenie was born in Baia Mare, Romania, in 1977, the son of a dentist, and studied at the art school in Baia Mare and at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, graduating in 2001. In 2005 he co-founded the Plan B gallery in Cluj with Mihai Pop, and he became part of the group of painters who made Cluj a name in contemporary art. He lives and works in Cluj, Berlin and London. His paintings, made with palette knives and stencils as much as brushes, take figures and scenes from twentieth-century history, Hitler, Stalin, Darwin and Van Gogh among them, and smear, scrape and blur them into dense, unsettling images. He represented Romania at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
His paintings have appeared at auction since the early 2010s, alongside drawings and collages. Provenance through his galleries and exhibition history are the usual checks.
Cluj, Plan B and Darwin's Room
His Romanian pavilion at the 2015 Biennale was called Darwin's Room.
His painting The Sunflowers in 1937 reworks Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and his work is in the Centre Pompidou and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among other collections.
Baia Mare, Plan B in Berlin and the palette knife
Ghenie was born on 13 August 1977 and went to the Gheorghe Șincai High School in Baia Mare, then to the town's Arts and Crafts School from 1991 to 1994. Plan B, which he and Mihai Pop set up in Cluj in 2005 to produce and show contemporary art, opened a permanent space in Berlin in 2008.
He hardly uses a brush. The paint goes on with a palette knife and through stencils, and the twentieth-century faces he returns to, many of them tied to genocide and mass suffering, come out torn, scored, blurred and flecked, a handling often compared with Francis Bacon's. His work has been shown at Tate Liverpool, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The Sunflowers in 1937 was sold by Galerie Judin in Berlin, which had bought it from him.
Best auction results
- Pie Fight Interior 12 HK$81m
- Oil on canvas, 2014 · Hong Kong · 26 May 2022
- Publicly reported
- The Sunflowers in 1937 £3.1m
- Oil on canvas, 2014 · London · 10 February 2016
- Publicly reported
- Ghenie's reworking of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, sold for several times its high estimate.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
