Adrian Ghenie: The Romanian painter tackling the 'unbearable beauty' of Rome

Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents Roman Campagna, an exhibition of new paintings and charcoal drawings by Adrian Ghenie. Created in his studio in Rome following his recent relocation, these works mark a decisive shiff in the artist’s practice, drawing on land- scape 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 Ghenie reworks the genre from within, folding art-historical reference into his distinctive painterly language to create works poised between pastoral idealism and contemporary unease. 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 ‘invente