Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie honors Egon Schiele in Vienna exhibition

Romania's renowned painter Adrian Ghenie honors Egon Schiele, one of expressionism's most important visual artists, with a special exhibition set to open on October 11 at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Based on a concept originated by Ciprian Adrian Barsan, the show envisions a return of Schiele's lost works, known only from black-and-white photographs.

According to a press release quoted by News.ro, Ghenie takes Schiele's lost works as an opportunity to embark on an impressive and unique search for traces with works created especially for this exhibition.

"Schiele was, of course, part of my intellectual archive, not in terms of style, but in terms of attitude. 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. This play with the human form marked the beginning of something new," said Adrian Ghenie.

Roughly one-quarter of Egon Schiele's paintings remain missing to this day or are known to have been lost or destroyed, for the most part prior to the Second World War, the museum said, adding that the exact circumstances surrounding their disappearance remain a mystery. Now, these lost images exist only as shadowy photographs.

The project Shadow Paintings "takes viewers along on a metaphysical journey through dissolution and eventual reincarnation." The emphasis in this new series of works is on the human body and on existence as such.

"Ghenie assumes the challenging task of not only resurrecting these works from the shadow world but also of physically re-embodying and reviving them. The point here is to refrain from physically replicating Schiele's own shadows and instead provide their deeper essence with a new, impossible embodiment," the museum explained.

The exhibition will be on view until March 2, 2025.

(Photo source: Facebook/Adrian Ghenie)