Lóránd Hegyi and Adrian Ghenie meet for a spontaneous and exciting talk in which the critic and the artist draw on their perspectives to outline the subtle themes that pervade Ghenie’s painting. The public is invited to join them on a walk through Darwin’s Room, a metaphorical antechamber of recent history, with all its storms, dissonances and occasional revelations.
'Adrian Ghenie’s painting is sensuous, immediate, lively, suggestive, and dynamic, despite being simultaneously very structured and balanced. The pictorial structure reflects academic compositional formulas and often points to specific structural methods used in the history painting of the nineteenth century. The pathetic gestures, the exaggerated emotionalism, the historicizing themes, and the didactic approach to history catered to the nostalgic, post-Romanticist, nationalistic ideology of Central European nations and attempted to bring stylistic elements and compositional solutions of the Renaissance and the Baroque up-to-date in order to narrate the myths and histories of the small nations as “grand narratives” of national identity, of specific national destiny.'
— Lóránd Hegyi
Lóránd Hegyi is one of the foremost European curators and art historians. He is currently the director of Le Musée d'art moderne de Saint-Etienne. He was co-curator of the Venice Biennale in 1993.
Moderated by Corina Șuteu, Curator of Public Events
http://darwinsroom.ro/events/
