The Notorious Knoedler Forgery Scandal Takes Center Stage in a Surreal Theater Epic

Authenticity reigns supreme in the art world. It’s what separates million-dollar, museum-worthy masterpieces from clever fakes. And it’s what moves viewers to tears. But what if, theater artist Łukasz Twarkowski asks, a forgery could kindle in you the same emotions?

“Does it mean that the tears were fake because the painting was fake?” he asked me. “Or does it mean the fake artwork can reveal real emotions and real tears?”

This is one of the provocations at the heart of the Polish director’s new production ROHTKO, which is opening at London’s Barbican Centre on October 2. The multimedia extravaganza unfolds across four hours with onstage performances, two video screens, and a soundtrack of techno beats to interrogate the value—and increasingly blurred outlines—of authenticity in art.

As indicated by its title, Mark Rothko serves as a throughline—or more specifically, the fake Rothkos that were sold by New York art gallery Knoedler & Co. from 1994 to 2011. In those years, the dealer moved dozens of paintings forged in the style of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Rothko. The scandal, later recounted in the 2020 Netflix documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, sparked an FBI investigation and the closure of the century-old gallery.

Twarkowski’s take on the fraud, however, is far more oblique. He takes as his starting point Shanzhai, a Chinese term meaning “mountain fort” that now stands for the phenomenon of clever counterfeit goods. It’s the world that’s given us Dolce & Banana and Samsing, among other bootlegs. A subculture and aesthetic, Shanzhai invests artistic merit in these knockoffs, seeing them as playful riffs on the real thing and deconstructions of established brands.

For Twarkowski, who had boned up on the 2017 book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, this shadow economy doubled as a philosophical prism through which to view authenticity. “We are seeing these two visions of the world: one which is never-ending and changing and the another, which is marked by the beginning and the end. If you don’t have the beginning, you don’t have the originality,” he explained, alluding to the Western art world’s prized provenance.

Bringing to the Stage

Now, Shanzhai has given us ROHTKO, the Shanzhai-esque twist on the painter’s name wholly deliberate. The work was in gestation for more than a year, Twarkowski told me, during which he and his longtime collaborator Anka Herbut researched areas from Rothko’s biography to the Knoedler trial. They then worked with actors over a period of improvisation to develop scenes: “We inspire them, they inspire us,” he said. Staging took up another six weeks.

ROHTKO had its premiere at the Dailes Theatre in Riga, Latvia, in 2022. Its Barbican run is happening as part of U.K./Poland Season 2025, a collaborative program between the British Council, the Polish Cultural Institute, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

The work is centered at a Chinese restaurant—a knockoff of Mr. Chow, a hub for the New York art world—at which various characters from sleek gallerists to destitute actors gather, interact, and converse. The narrative takes us from the 1960s, during the final years of Rothko’s life, to the era of digital art, when the idea of value has only grown woolier with the rise of NFTs. While the performance transpires onstage, camera operators film the action and players, with a live feed projected on two screens.

What subtly unfolds are layers upon layers of shifting reality. The Chinese restaurant itself represents what Twarkowski called a “no-man’s land,” the concept having been so widely replicated across Western cities as to almost seem hollow (the Knoedler forger, notably, was a Chinese man living in Queens, New York). The video feed offers a whole other frame of reference: “The truth of the screen becomes another reality, which is stronger than the reality of the stage,” the director said.

Even theater as a medium, being performative and illusory, loosens the grip of authenticity—Twarkowski deemed it a “strange form of art, which has repetition inscribed in its DNA.”

“Is it really happening anew every day, or is it the same thing that is happening?” he said. “We were asking ourselves: when you do international co-productions, what does it mean when there is a second premiere in another country? How many premieres can you have? Is the second premiere a fake premiere, because the first one was the original one?”

Beyond the Myth

This multimedia approach to exploring the hazy lines between reality and illusion has been a hallmark of Twarkowski’s innovative performances. Where 2023’s The Employees examined the nature of human consciousness, his most recent work, Oracle, probed artificial intelligence through the lens of Alan Turing’s life story. However heady these brews, Twarkowski has not lost sight of the humans and human feeling at the center of these performances.

In ROHTKO, for instance, a performer recounts the tale of a Latvian artist who had planned to sit in front of Rothko’s work, cry, and collect her tears for a video sculpture. She killed herself before realizing the project. The performer reflects that were she to collect such tears from a viewing of Rothko’s paintings, she would save them for a possible future where people might feel nothing looking at an artwork.

It’s a moment that captures Twarkowski and Herbut’s deeper aim to stir something in the viewer that exists beyond the performance. What is happening on stage is not the most important thing, he explained, “but what it evokes in the spectator. It is the same with the artwork. Is it about the art, or it is the relation between the art and the viewer?”

The heart of the piece, of course, belongs to Rothko. The artist is regarded as a hero in his native Latvia, and Twarkowski has been captivated by the guy since he laid eyes on Rothko’s Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern. He recalled “the silence that appears once you get in and how speechless you are being there between these paintings”—a reverence he also felt at the 2023 Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

But digging into Rothko’s life, Twarkowski admitted, left him disillusioned. He received a distinct view of the painter’s strained relationships with his wives and children, as well as his suicide, which the director described as “more an act of cowardice than any romanticized heroism.” ROHTKO brings forth these demons, but not before, it seems, its director glimpsed the real man behind the constructed myth.

“More often, with such big figures of art, when you start digging into their personal life, you’re usually more disappointed than appreciative of them,” he conceded. “Knowing him more as a person really took off some of the magic.”

ROHTKO is on view at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, October 2–5. 

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com