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until 18.01. | #4872ARTatBerlin | Galerie Judin (Tankstelle) shows from 15. November 2025 (Opening: 14.11.) the exhibition “Cloud Fever“ by the artist Adrian Ghenie.
In this new body of works, Ghenie examines a society increasingly absorbed by social media and digital routines. Starting from the familiar image of a person eating breakfast while staring at a smartphone, the works address the consequences of excessive screen time: shrinking attention spans, weakened judgment, emotional amplification through algorithms, and the erosion of real-world interaction. The concept of “brain rot,” Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2024, serves as a point of departure for Ghenie’s artistic response.
Ghenie himself has never engaged with social media, a position that grants him distance — though not without a certain envy for the effortless digital fluency of younger generations. As in his earlier series, he approaches the subject with quasi-scientific detachment, this time less as a historian and more as an anthropologist observing a new human type: the Homo digitalis. This species commands unprecedented access to information yet retreats into algorithmically curated digital worlds. For Ghenie, digitalization resembles a new ideology — one that simplifies complex realities while simultaneously producing fragmentation and echo chambers.
The figures in his paintings are distorted humanoid forms reminiscent of science-fiction creatures. They do not depict “brain rot” directly; instead, they embody Ghenie’s everyday routines — routines that mirror our own. Works such as The Breakfast, Teenager 2, and The Nightbird 2 illustrate the simultaneous acts of eating and digital consumption, and the reflexive and addiction-like compulsion to stay connected. In Nexus, the phone is set aside while the figure reads Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller on information networks and the risks of AI. The presence of a printed book written by a human provides a rare moment of analog comfort. Cultural habits also change: Dune presents streaming as yet another automated routine, while Untitled juxtaposes a fast-food setting with references to Roman friezes, merging “impossible bodies”, as Ghenie has called his figures, with an “impossible décor.”
Standing apart from the rest of the series is The Acrobat, an homage to Picasso’s Young Acrobat on a Ball (1905). Its calm, dignified atmosphere — free of smartphones and technological clutter — underscores how drastically the world has changed in just over a century. Picasso’s figures engage with one another; Ghenie’s remain isolated. Though the medium of painting has not changed in 120 years, the conditions of human experience have transformed beyond recognition.
Adrian Ghenie was born (1977) and educated in Romania. His paintings have entered the collections of international museums such as Tate, London; The Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Pompidou, Paris. Most recently, the Albertina, Vienna, and the Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden, have mounted solo exhibitions.
Galerie Judin Tankstelle:
Bülowstrasse 17
10783 Berlin
Opening: Friday,14. November 2025, 6 to 8 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 15. November 2025– Sunday, 18. January 2026
To the gallery
Titel image caption: Adrian Ghenie, The Breakfast, 2025. Oil on canvas, 105 × 140 cm.
Exhibition Adrian Ghenie – Galerie Judin | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
