Adrian Ghenie ROMAN CAMPAGNA
New Paintings and Drawings

On one hand, I work on an image in an almost classical vein: composition, figuration, use of light. On the other hand, I do not refrain from resorting to all kinds of idioms, such as the surrealist principle of association or the abstract experiments which foreground texture and surface.

— Adrian Ghenie

 

Created in his studio in Rome following his recent relocation, this new series of works marks a decisive shift in Adrian Ghenie’s practice, drawing on landscape painting as both subject and form. Ghenie reworks the genre from within, folding art-historical reference into his distinctive painterly language to create works poised between pastoral idealism and contemporary unease.

 

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Adrian Ghenie
Italian Landscape with Ruin, 2026
Oil on canvas
190 × 170 cm (74.8 × 66.93 in)

 

In his new oil paintings, Ghenie portrays flurried figures atop the cobblestones of a well-preserved stretch of the Appian Way, where he now lives. One of the earliest and most significant Roman roads, the Appian Way cuts through a landscape central to the development of European painting. Ghenie cites Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, whose atmospheric renderings of this region helped establish landscape as an autonomous genre. Retracing this lineage, Ghenie explores the idea of the ‘invented landscape’ and the tradition of the capriccio, in which real and imagined elements are brought together to create scenes that feel at once composed and mnemonic.

Adrian Ghenie
The Roman Road, 2026
Oil on canvas
190 × 135 cm (74.8 × 53.15 in)

 

 

Using familiar devices – wide vistas, repoussoirs – Ghenie constructs landscapes that are, in his words, ‘recognisable, but not descriptive’: images that evoke a shared visual memory shaped by art history, yet subtly undone through his deconstructed pictorial language. ‘Working’, as art historian James Hall observes, ‘in that tradition of European visionary sublime painting’, Ghenie reconfigures fragments of the visible world into works that are at once art-historically coded and psychologically charged.

A defining tension in the works on view arises from the encounter between backdrops punctuated with ancient ruins and contemporary figures equipped with trainers, backpacks, umbrellas or hiking poles. These sharply rendered, lucid details function as what Ghenie calls ‘anchors’, tying the otherwise turbulent, abstracted scenes to the present day. As the artist says: ‘You have to see the reality, process it, and come up with a set of symbols which will evoke that reality for you.’

Adrian Ghenie
The Shepherds of Arcadia, 2026
Oil on canvas
190 × 130 cm (74.8 × 51.18 in)

 

In The Shepherds of Arcadia (2026), Ghenie reimagines Poussin’s painting of the same name (1637–38). ‘However’, as curator Cecilia Alemani writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, ‘Ghenie reinterprets that painting’s classical encounter as a collision of divergent scales and temporalities. Discarding the idealized mourning scene of the original, the artist construes his composition as a stage for temporal collapse: the monumental tomb, once a stable cornerstone of Western memory, is given the same restless, scumbled finish as the surrounding scrub. By stripping the scene of its philosophical stillness, Ghenie replaces the poise of Poussin’s picture with a sense of sudden, awkward proximity.’

 

As Alemani continues, ‘he substitutes two more recent art-historical references for the standing figures flanking the tomb’: on the right, ‘an African sculpture of the type that inspired not only Picasso but many of his modernist contemporaries has stepped in for the yellow-draped woman presiding over Poussin’s narrative’, while to the left stands a figure with jester-like legs recalling those of Picasso’s The Actor (1904–5), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In Ghenie’s version, instead of pausing to contemplate a tomb, this passerby stops to urinate next to the ruins.

Nicolas Poussin

The Arcadian Shepherds, 1637–38
Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Pablo Picasso

The Actor, 1904–5

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Adrian Ghenie
Roman Campagna 2, 2026
Oil on canvas
110 × 115 cm (43.31 × 45.28 in)

 

Philip Guston

Roma, 1971

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

For the artist, humour is a means of probing the friction between antiquity and modern life. This approach, at once irreverent and unsettling, is indebted to Philip Guston’s Roma series, painted in the same region in 1970–71: a key reference in this body of work whose distinctive pink palette is echoed in Ghenie’s Roman Campagna 2 (2026).

 

 

 

Adrian Ghenie

Octopus Fighting a Lobster (after a Roman Mosaic), 2026

Oil on canvas

190 × 135 cm (74.8 × 53.15 in)

 

In Octopus Fighting a Lobster (after a Roman Mosaic) (2026), Ghenie paints a Roman mosaic depicting a sepia-toned marine composition, which he reinterprets in his own characteristic painterly language. At once a still life-coded banquet and a lush, movemented underwater scene, overflowing with living creatures, the work presents a profound engagement with the art-historical tradition of Ghenie’s surroundings, as well as, as Cecilia Alemani has written, ‘a primeval return to the succulent and the anatomically complex’. The work draws on a mosaic panel discovered in Pompeii and now held in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, in Naples.

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In contrast to the sterile, unpaintable surfaces of the digital world, [...] the work reimagines the ancient work of art not as a static relic but as a site of frantic, liquid energy. Ghenie fully inhabits the motif, allowing the wet, tangled struggle of marine life to provide structural grit and tactile relief. The painting is an exercise in pure texture—a deliberate immersion into a world of moisture and friction that reasserts the physical presence of the object against the encroaching flatness of the contemporary gaze.

— Cecilia Alemani

Since his relocation to Italy, Ghenie’s relationship with the layers of ancient vestiges and superimposed art-historical traditions that surround him has become a direct, unmediated one. They offer themselves up to him, as Alemani adds, ‘to be felt, touched, and, ultimately, deconstructed through a restless excavation of new textures.’ This sense of tactility and depth is particularly palpable in Octopus Fighting a Lobster (after a Roman Mosaic), in which layers of paint appear as if woven into one another, finished with fibrous brushstrokes – like those of Chaïm Soutine – in greys and flushed, fleshy tones of pink and red.

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Adrian Ghenie

Studio Scene with the Tomb of Seneca, 2026

Oil on canvas

190 × 120 cm (74.8 × 47.24 in)

 

‘Seneca’s tomb’, on the Appian Way, Rome

Photo: Adrian Ghenie

 

Studio Scene with the Tomb of Seneca riffs on the reputed tomb of the first-century Stoic philosopher located at the fourth milestone of the Appian Way, dragging its crumbling masonry into the unvarnished reality of a space occupied by modern studio clutter. On the right, [a] laptop’s unmistakable silhouette introduces a sharp, technological note, its geometric coldness contrasting with the ancient brickwork. The monument, stripped of its funerary silence, is reanimated through violent painterly erasures, suggesting that to truly see Seneca today, one must peel back the layers of historical exhaustion. Ghenie thus transforms the act of painting into a form of archaeology—an anxious search for a truth that survives only through the friction of the present.

— Cecilia Alemani 

Adrian Ghenie

Roman Campagna 1, 2026

Oil on canvas

170 × 160 cm (66.93 x 62.99 in)

 

Though not always self-portraits, all the figures are derived from the artist’s own silhouette, which he breaks down and recomposes. As he explains: ‘Once you leave the traditional constraints of anatomy behind, the way you deform can become a portrait of character or the inner psyche.’ In his depiction of the figure in Roman Campagna 1 (2026) – at once restless and controlled – the bared teeth set in a block-like skull recall the figures of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The blue-grey sky, meanwhile, forms an abstract plane upon which the snaking outlines of mountains or clouds emerge, recalling the ribbons of colour of Willem de Kooning’s late work.

Adrian Ghenie

Studio Scene with Roman Statue, 2026

Oil on canvas

120 × 90 cm (47.24 × 35.43 in)

 

James Ensor

 Squelette arrêtant masques, 1891

 

While rooted in the landscape tradition, several of the paintings incorporate elements of cluttered studio interiors that recall Giorgio de Chirico’s illogical architectures. The collision between the archaic and the contemporary and between exterior landscape and interior reflection that characterises this body of work is crystallised in Studio Scene with Roman Statue (2026), a counterintuitively open-skied interior studio scene. Landscape and studio become inseparable, binding the act of painting to its subject. This work, as Alemani writes, ‘juxtaposes modern furniture, stretched canvases, and the indispensable tool of the Now—a laptop computer, perched on a filing cabinet or stack of boxes—with fragments of ancient sculptures and a bold quotation from James Ensor’s Skeleton Stopping Masqueraders (1891).’ Here, Ghenie portrays himself holding a paintbrush, further emphasising the reflexive nature of this body of work.

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Ghenie has devised an innovative charcoal technique that dissolves the conventional boundaries between drawing and painting. By priming his paper for oil paint, he creates a surface that resists the permanent mark, allowing him to erase, smudge, and rework his gestures with total freedom. He describes this approach as “drawing based on mistakes”—a process in which errors are not a failure to be corrected but a vital catalyst in the evolution of an image. Through this enacted cycle of removal and accumulation, he builds hybrid, composite figures that exist in a state of flux, drawing on diverse art-historical and contemporary cultural references to suggest a body that is being constantly reconstructed.

— Cecilia Alemani

Ghenie starts by assembling fragments from magazines and photographs into collages, which he translates into charcoal and finally into paint. Favouring charcoal for its responsiveness, he builds the drawings through incessant erasing and reworking, while the block-like structure of the collages remains visible in the planes of colour that characterise the paintings.

Ghenie’s engagement with art history unfolds as an imagined dialogue, shaped by admiration, rivalry, and ‘a desire to reply’. His relationship to the landscape itself is marked by both attraction and resistance. The particular light of the Roman countryside shapes this body of work, introducing a new palette of olive greens and silvery atmospheric blues, as do sculptural stone pines and pillow-like clouds, even as the artist mounts painterly resistance to this ‘unbearable’ beauty. Distorted forms, bruised colours and agitated shadows disrupt the classical harmony of the works, suggesting the past buried beneath the commotion of the present. Alemani identifies ‘a broader philosophy in Ghenie’s practice: a ritual of accumulation and erasure, driven by the belief that art exists not as a linear evolution but as a collage cohabited by the ancient and the modern.’ In the artist’s words, these paintings engage not only with the history of painting but with ‘painting the texture of history’. ‘This’, he says, ‘is what painting does, paints not an image but the texture of an era.’

Adrian Ghenie

The Sunrise, 2026

Oil on canvas

130 × 165 cm (51.18 × 64.96 in)

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Within these memoryscapes, the uncanny human figure emerges as a liminal force—a vessel for the anonymous shepherds and wayfarers who have traversed this basalt surface for millennia, their forms dissolving into the very stone and shadows they inhabit.

— Cecilia Alemani

In the press

Featured in The Art Newspaper France

12 May 2026

Adrian Ghenie: Roman Campagna

Exhibition review

The Art Newspaper France states: 'He shatters this cliché by infusing it with his own obsessions, employing a sense of ellipsis and a taste for the grotesque.'

Born in 1977 in Baia Mare, Romania, Ghenie lives and works in Rome and Berlin. He was selected to represent Romania at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and, more recently, had solo exhibitions at Galerie Judin, Berlin (2025 and 2021); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2024); Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (2024); Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp (2023 and 2020); State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (2019); and Palazzo Cini, Venice (2019). In 2022, two site-specific paintings by the artist were permanently installed in the historic setting of Chiesa della Madonna della Mazza, Palermo in an independent project curated by Alessandra Borghese. Alongside his paintings, the artist has created several installations conceived as a ‘room within a room’: The Dada Room (2010), now in the permanent collection of S.M.A.K., Ghent, and The Darwin Room (2013-14), in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Previous solo exhibitions have taken place at Villa Medici, Rome (2017); CAC Málaga, Spain (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2012); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2010); and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2009). 

 

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