London's Haunch of Venison is trying to start afresh, more or less. The behemoth of a contemporary art gallery is leaving the museumlike venue abutting the Royal Academy that it had occupied since 2009, and moving back to its recently refurbished original premises in Mayfair. Owned by Christie's since 2007, the business suffered the abrupt departure of founding directors Graham Southern and Harry Blain last summer (they opened a venture of their own, Blain Southern, on nearby Dering Street). Now the move seems like a perfect opportunity for the gallery to reinvent itself — and also to prove to the art world, which has snubbed it since the sale to the auction house, that the artistic program is, more than ever, the top priority.

"We are looking forward to coming back and having the focus that a space this size will give us," Ben Tufnell, the gallery's head of exhibitions, told ARTINFO UK. "For the last two and a half years we've been running a program with two or sometimes even three or four shows on at one time in Burlington Gardens, and that's been pretty exhausting." Indeed, there have been rumors that the gallery, which also has an outpost in New York's Rockefeller Center, has stretched itself too thin in recent years.

With former Christie's postwar and contemporary art expert Matthew Carey-Williams now at its helm, Haunch of Venison London is ready to open a new chapter in its tumultuous history. "We've been looking at taking on some new artists," says Tufnell — which is hardly surprising considering that several of Haunch's heavy-hitters, including Bill Viola and Mat Collishaw, followed Blain and Southern out the door. "But it's not like we've completely changed direction. It'll be more of the same, but only better and more focused."

Younger artists are to play a key role in this new program, which will kick off on September 8th with a solo show by Romanian-born, London-based painter Adrian Ghenie. "His work engages with quite complex ideas about history, memory, and what it is to be a human being, but in a way that is very accessible," says Tufnell. "He's using a very traditional language to speak about the contemporary." Yet Ghenie's main references for this new body of works are decidedly historical: the artist is probing ideas of eugenics, selective breeding, and Nazi appropriation of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory. "I am interested in the presence of evil," the artist has said, "or more precisely how the possibility for evil is found in every endeavor, even in those scientific projects which set out to benefit mankind."

The show proceeds in this dark vein, with several pictures portraying Nazi surgeon Josef Mengele as a featureless creature, his face pulped into bloody flesh as if wounded by the very experiments he inflicted on the inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Tufnell argues that Ghenie's paintings feed on contemporary debates about social fracture and the categorization of citizens — issues made very palpable by the recent riots in Britain. "It would be wrong to pigeonhole Ghenie as a history painter," says Jane Neal, a leading expert on Eastern European contemporary art. "I feel a more accurate description would be artist cum archaeologist or anthropologist."

Contemporary or not, these pictures have a rawness and expressive power that is impossible to ignore. Francis Bacon comes to mind, and it's not by chance. Since relocating to London last year, Ghenie has been immersing himself into the work of the great British master. The stately pose and confined space of his "Self-Portrait as Charles Darwin" (2011) are redolent of Bacon's series of Pope Innocent X, and the sitting figure is infused with the same ominous forces. Says Tufnell, "Adrian Ghenie is very interested in the idea of portraiture: How can you make portraiture in the 21st century?" This "Self-Portrait as Charles Darwin" has an undisguised mise-en-scène. The artist is pictured wearing a mask: instead of revealing his inner psyche, he literally adopts the appearance of the object of his research. Much more modest in size, Ghenie's "Self-Portrait as a Monkey" functions as a pendant to this piece — the artist turns into a threatening ape, man's ancestor according to the first scholar of evolution theory. For Ghenie, portraiture is transformation.

Ghenie's work responds perfectly to the current "appetite" — to use Tufnell's word — for figurative painting. The artist is one of the leading figures of the so-called Cluj scene, which includes the likes of Victor Man, Ciprian Muresan, and Serban Savu. This vibrant Transylvanian artistic community  came to prominence largely thanks to Haunch of Venison's group show "Cluj Connection," curated by Jane Neal in Zürich in 2006. Ghenie joined the gallery soon after, and Haunch of Venison has been a fervent supporter of the Cluj scene ever since.

But the gallery's former directors, Blain and Southern, are also claiming their share of the Transylvanian pie. The very day of Ghenie's opening, Blain Southern will inaugurate their first exhibition with Cluj-based painter Marius Bercea, again curated by Neal. Tufnell declined to comment on this  rivalrous choice. The hatchet is not buried, clearly — but Londoners are the beneficiaries of the feud. Next month, they'll be able to enjoy not one, but two exciting representatives of what might soon be called a new school of painting.