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| Geta Brătescu 28 June – 24 August 2008 |
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Opening |
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Geta Brătescu
is regarded as one of the most remarkable personalities of Romanian
post-war avant-garde art. With a background in literature and
philosophy studies, pursued in parallel with those in art, Geta
Brătescu’s artistic practice began in the heterogeneous and
provocative intellectual environment of the 1940s and 1950s and has
passed through the political upheaval of Socialism in Romania and its
successive collapse at the end of the year 1989. The fact that the
artist has experienced these social and cultural turns is an essential
factor in understanding her recurrent appeal to particular forms of
artistic expression. The exhibition at Galerie im Taxispalais Innsbruck represents the first extensive international presentation of Geta Brătescu’s performances, films, drawings and objects that she created in Bucharest during the mid-seventies. The conceptual and the processual character of Brătescu’s work expands the investigation of visual language beyond formal aestheticism and material convention and leads further to a specific engagement of the spectator with the intimate, physical and mental, universe of the artist. The particularity of Brătescu’s oeuvre is that it results from a complex act of self-examination, which aims to objectify body and things, in a movement from the subjective and real towards a state of the objective and the abstraction. In the 1970s, upon which the exhibition focuses, Geta Brătescu developed an intermedia concept for space-specific, performative works in which she investigated the relation between physiognomy, the body and the surrounding space. In 1977 Brătescu wrote the script for her first recorded performance entitled “The Studio” (1978, camera Ion Grigorescu). The film functions as a self-representational story exploring and processing in “coupes mobiles” the artist’s mental and physical environment, outlining a symbolic and even ideological relationship with the camera. The camera, named the Eye in the text, infiltrates in the artist’s universe (the studio) surveying it as a voyeur. For Brătescu the studio is the space to redefine the Self, the space where the artist confesses freely her pleasure in playfulness; it is a stage where ideas come alive and where the performed gestures disclose alternative scripts to the day-to-day condition. In the studio, the subjective gestures of the artist fuse with its site and its context of display. Thus, usually the artist’s works were produced and mounted in the studio, and exhibited there for the first time, and in certain cases, the only time. This goes for the case of the spatial installation “No to Violence” created by the artist in the studio in 1974, which was developed from the construction of an object similar to a bandaged elbow. The installation discusses the matter of artifice in art, the status of the artifact and the rapport instituted between design and art. “Towards White” (1975), “Self-Portrait, Towards White” (1975) and “From Black to White” (1976) can be perceived as the sequences of a theatrical play, where the acting role, assumed by the artist, brings into discussion questions of self-identity and its cancellation (through a successive over-lapping of plastic bags on the artist’s face in “Self-Portrait, Towards White”) and of the dematerialization of the object and the body in space (in “Towards White”). In the film “Hands” (1977, camera Ion Grigorescu), subtitled “For the eye, the hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait”, the actors are the artist’s hands. Through a cinematic succession of suggestive gestural movements, the hands are seen as selecting, playing with small objects and then drawing their linear profile on the table, providing an alternative mode of reconstructing the artist’s portrait / identity. Geta Brătescu was born in Ploiesti in 1926. She lives and works in Bukarest. |
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| Curated by Alina Şerban in collaboration with Silvia Eiblmayr Catalogue An exhibition catalogue is being published. Thanks to Promocult – Project supported by Ministry of Culture and Cults, Romania Romanian Cultural Institute, Vienna Centre for Visual Introspection, Bukarest |
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