As part of Tarik Talk’s 30 Days, 4 Cities: European Art Tour, Adrian Ghenie’s exhibition at Pace Gallery Berlin explores the instability of memory, the construction of history, and the ways painting can confront power, trauma, identity, and the distortion of truth.
Some exhibitions remain with you long after you leave.
At Pace Gallery Berlin, Adrian Ghenie’s paintings create exactly that kind of encounter—one that is visually immediate but psychologically difficult to resolve.
As part of Tarik Talk’s 30 Days, 4 Cities: European Art Tour, the exhibition offered an intense exploration of contemporary painting and its ability to address the unstable relationship between history, memory, images, and power.
Ghenie’s paintings confront the viewer from the beginning.
Figures appear and disappear. Faces emerge only to dissolve again. Thick layers of paint collide with scraped and disrupted surfaces.
Recognition is constantly interrupted.
And that instability becomes central to the experience.
Painting at the Edge of Recognition
Ghenie’s figures often feel strangely familiar.
A face may appear recognizable for a moment before becoming obscured by paint. A body might emerge from a composition only to collapse back into abstraction.
This tension between recognition and disruption creates a psychological unease.
The eye continually searches for something stable.
But stability rarely arrives.
Instead, Ghenie keeps the viewer moving between figuration and abstraction, familiarity and distortion, forcing us to reconsider how much information we need before believing we understand an image.
The Fragility of Historical Memory
Memory—particularly historical memory—sits at the center of the experience.
History in Ghenie’s paintings does not appear fixed, complete, or safely contained in the past.
It feels fractured.
Rewritten.
Blurred.
The works raise questions about who controls historical narratives and how images participate in constructing our understanding of people, events, authority, and trauma.
Rather than illustrating history directly, the paintings explore its instability.
What happens when memories change?
What happens when images are repeated so frequently that they begin replacing the events they supposedly document?
And who determines which version of history survives?
These questions give the exhibition much of its psychological weight.
Surfaces Under Pressure
The physical surfaces of Ghenie’s paintings are essential to their impact.
Paint is layered, scraped, smeared, and disrupted. Certain areas feel almost violently worked, while others retain enough recognizable information to pull the viewer back toward an identifiable image.
The process remains visible.
These are not polished surfaces designed for quick consumption.
They demand time.
The eye rarely settles comfortably in one place. Instead, it moves continuously across competing areas of figuration, texture, erasure, and abstraction.
That instability mirrors many of the themes beneath the paintings: violence, authority, trauma, erasure, memory, and the manipulation of truth.
The paintings seem almost physically incapable of providing a single, stable narrative.
Space for Uncertainty
Pace Gallery’s restrained presentation becomes particularly important.
The works are given significant room to exist independently, allowing each painting to register before the next enters the viewer’s attention.
There is no visual rush.
That pacing allows uncertainty to become part of the experience.
You do not need to immediately decide what an image means.
Instead, you can remain with its contradictions.
For work that deals so intensely with unstable images and fragmented narratives, that freedom feels essential.
Seeing Ghenie in Berlin
Experiencing these paintings in Berlin adds another dimension.
Berlin is a city whose physical and cultural landscape remains deeply marked by rupture, destruction, division, reconstruction, and historical memory.
Questions about how history is preserved, confronted, repressed, interpreted, and rewritten are embedded throughout the city.
Against that context, Ghenie’s paintings feel particularly charged.
Their fractured surfaces echo larger questions surrounding collective memory: how societies construct narratives around difficult histories and how images can simultaneously preserve and distort our understanding of the past.
The relationship does not provide an easy explanation of the work.
Instead, it intensifies its questions.
Painting Without Resolution
By the end of the exhibition, there is no neat conclusion.
There are fragments.
Questions.
Images that remain partially unresolved.
And an emotional residue that continues after leaving the gallery.
That absence of resolution is one of the exhibition’s strengths.
Ghenie’s paintings do not attempt to make difficult histories comfortable. Nor do they present painting as a medium capable of neatly explaining political or psychological complexity.
Instead, painting becomes a place where those contradictions can remain visible.
When an Exhibition Changes How You Look
As part of Tarik Talk’s 30 Days, 4 Cities: European Art Tour, Adrian Ghenie’s exhibition at Pace Gallery Berlin demonstrates why painting remains such a powerful medium for examining contemporary life.
The works operate somewhere between image and erasure, beauty and discomfort, memory and invention.
They remind us that images are never entirely neutral.
They can preserve history.
They can reshape it.
They can reinforce power.
And they can destabilize the narratives we thought we understood.
This is not an exhibition that asks to be consumed quickly.
It rewards time and close attention.
And perhaps most importantly, it allows viewers to leave without certainty.
Sometimes the questions that remain after an exhibition are more powerful than any answers it could have provided.