Adrian Ghenie Capricci romani
Capricci romani, an exhibition of previously unseen works on paper by Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977, Baia Mare, Romania), is conceived by Alessandra Borghese and promoted by the Fondazione Ghenie Chapels – Mecenatismo per l'Arte and the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica of Rome, curated by Fabio De Chirico and Pier Paolo Pancotto, and supported by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. Staged at Palazzo Poli in Rome from 24 September to 15 November 2026, it brings together works on paper and cardboard specifically made for the exhibition.
Widely regarded as one of the most significant painters of his generation, Adrian Ghenie has lived and worked in Rome for several years. His studio, on Via Appia, is surrounded by Roman aqueducts, ancient ruins and their countryside, and a constant stream of tourists and pilgrims enamoured of the world's most ancient road. After his move, the artist's pictorial research has come to focus on the theme of the Roman countryside and the 'invented' landscape, a genre that has been central for centuries and developed by great masters before him. His influences span from the Classicism of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, through to the picturesque, melancholic Romanticism of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, whose atmospheric renderings of this region helped establish landscape as an autonomous genre.
Retracing this lineage, and following in the celebrated footsteps of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the artist explores the tradition of the capriccio, a genre popular from the seventeenth century onward, in which real and imagined elements are brought together to create scenes that feel at once composed and mnemonic. He 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, capable of fusing figuration and abstraction.
