Galerie Judin
Berlin
Potsdamer Strasse 83
+49 30 39404840
WEB
Cluj Connection 3D
dal 5/2/2015 al 10/4/2015

Segnalato da

David Ulrichs



 
calendario eventi  :: 




5/2/2015

Cluj Connection 3D

Galerie Judin, Berlin

The exhibition brings together eight artists connected to Cluj, who are working with sculpture and installation.


comunicato stampa

Galerie Judin is pleased to pre­sent Cluj Connec­tion 3D, an exhi­bi­tion that brings together eight artists connected to Cluj, Roma­nia, who are working with sculp­ture and installa­tion: Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin, Răzvan Botiș, Mircea Cantor, Radu Cioca, Ciprian Mureşan, Vlad Olariu, Cristi Pogăcean and Gabriela Vanga. Sev­eral of the par­tic­ipants are already well-known, successful fig­ures in the interna­tional art world, oth­ers are younger, promis­ing artists, just be­gin­ning to attract atten­tion.

The exhi­bi­tion is a sequel to the sem­inal exhi­bi­tion: Cluj Connec­tion, curated by Jane Neal in 2006, in collab­o­ra­tion with the Roma­nian artist/curator and director of Plan B Gallery, Mihai Pop, for Juerg Judin, the then director of Haunch of Veni­son Gallery, Zurich. Cluj Connec­tion 3D reunites the team behind the orig­inal exhi­bi­tion, at the epony­mous Galerie Judin in Berlin and four of the orig­inal artists: Mircea Cantor, Ciprian Mureşan, Cristi Pogăcean and Gabriela Vanga.

In the ensu­ing nine years since the first exhi­bi­tion, it has been inter­est­ing to note that though many of Cluj’s artists are now rec­og­nized interna­tion­ally, and sev­eral of them have come to be described as ’stars’, it is paint­ing and painters such as Adrian Ghenie and Victor Man that Cluj has come to be most renowned for. How­ever, if the art world has pre­vi­ously focused more on Cluj’s painters than its sculptors (with the excep­tion of Cantor and Mureşan who are interna­tion­ally rec­og­nized and respected fig­ures), the time has now come for it to read­just and widen its lens.

Nearly a decade on from the orig­inal Cluj Connec­tion exhi­bi­tion, Cluj Connec­tion 3D has been orga­nized in order to re-formu­late the ideas of the orig­inal show and draw atten­tion to the fact that - along with Cantor, Mureşan and Vanga, sev­eral of the most promis­ing artists of the younger gen­er­a­tion in Cluj are in fact working in three, as well as two dimen­sions. Some of these could be described as sculptors, or as multi-media artists with a focus on sculp­ture and installa­tion, and in a sim­i­lar vein to Cluj’s painters, they succeed in marrying a greater aware­ness of the behav­ioral prop­er­ties of their cho­sen medium and technical pro­ficiency in its han­dling, with a solid ground­ing in the the­o­ries and move­ments that have dom­inated the devel­op­ment of sculp­ture through­out the 20th and into the 21st Century.

With much of con­tem­po­rary sculp­ture focus­ing on the medium’s phys­ical char­ac­ter­is­tics, the object’s rela­tion­ship with the viewer is often over­looked. The par­tic­ipatory aspect of sculp­ture and the need for a viewer to accept a degree of respon­si­bil­ity dur­ing the pro­cess of engag­ing with an encountered object are some­thing that all of the artists in Cluj Connec­tion 3D are aware of and share. Also appar­ent is that the major­ity of the work in the exhi­bi­tion revolves around the exis­ten­tial ques­tions thrown up by our human con­di­tion. The art histo­rian Georges Didi-Huber­mann describes how, as we come face to face with sculp­ture (which he believes we often uncon­sciously per­ceive as a hol­low, empty ves­sel), we expe­r­i­ence a deep-seated fear of empti­ness and death. Not surpris­ingly the memento mori is a theme that can be found occurring through­out the show: some­times explic­itly, in the form of the archetypal skull (in this case piled into a giant mound by Olariu, who was inspired by the 19th Century paint­ing The Apotheo­sis of War (1871) by Vasily Vasilye­vich Vereshcha­gin), or expressed as a hid­den, but thinly veiled threat, such as a hid­den knife within an aloe vera plant, which Botiș explores.

The pol­i­tics of power and the role of Church and State (still very much in focus in Roma­nia and often the sub­ject of con­tro­versy) are also ques­tioned in the con­text of this exhi­bi­tion, notably by Mureşan in Teoctist, his re working of Mau­r­izio Cate­lan’s icon­oclas­tic sculp­ture, with the Roma­nian Patri­arch being hit by a thun­der bolt. The strug­gle for supremacy, the employ­ment of pro­paganda and the age-old ten­sion between East and West, are brought up to date and cat­a­pulted into the 21st Century while simulta­ne­ously being exposed as ancient, ever-repeat­ing pat­terns: Cioca uses bas-relief to con­sider the ongo­ing role of pro­paganda in Being Built, and Olariu has recre­ated the Siege of Con­stantinople with a twist: it is carved not out of stone, but from the decid­edly mod­ern, indus­trial pack­ag­ing prod­uct, sty­rofoam. War­fare and weaponry are some­times directly ref­er­enced, at other times, alluded to, and through­out Cluj Connec­tion 3D, there are con­stant reminders of man’s bat­tles and fears.

A number of the younger artists, like Boșcu Kafchin, Cioca and Olariu, are engaged in revis­it­ing the ancient sculptural tra­di­tions of the frieze and the bas-relief. The tra­di­tion of the mon­u­ment has also been reconfig­ured: the fig­ure of the hero and awinged Nike have been re-formu­lated and re-con­textu­al­ized. Pogăcean has combined the clas­sical hero and the reli­gious icon in a giant recre­ation of the Transform­ers cartoon fig­ure Opti­mus Prime, and Vanga has moved from Nike into a Lego bow and arrow in No Sec­ondary Thought - a not so oblique ref­er­ence to how chil­dren become famil­iar with weapons of war­fare, or even with fight­ing directly. These pow­erful symbols are bal­anced in the exhi­bi­tion by fluid expres­sions of form, such as in the ambi­tious large-scale sheet-metal installa­tions of Boșcu Kafchin and the re-worked Calder mobile of Botiș; both artists being highly influ­enced by the draw­ings of some of the great fig­ures of the last century, like Mar­cel Duchamp or Cy Twombly.

Humor and irony also lace through the works of the exhi­bi­tion, counterbal­anc­ing the more ser­i­ous themes. One darkly humor­ous exam­ple takes the form of a model of the Greek Ortho­dox cathedral that has proven con­tro­ver­sial in Roma­nia for its enor­mous size, huge cost and poten­tial loca­tion. It is to be erected directly oppo­site the parlia­ment housed in Ceaus­escu’s infa­mous ’People’s Palace’. The artist, Mureşan, has made the model on a scale of 1:666, leav­ing us in no doubt that he, at least, regards the pro­posal for the cathedral as dia­bol­ical.

Myths and folk tra­di­tions sit comfort­ably along­side the formal con­cerns of the exhib­ited works - one of the most poignant being Cantor’s ref­er­ence to Bran­cusi’s final birds from his ’Bird in Space’ se­ries that he sent off to an Indian prince, who wanted them for a planned temple of med­i­ta­tion - Bran­cusi had always wanted to combine his works of sculp­ture with archi­tec­ture, so he designed the temple too, which would have housed three of the birds. Two of these three birds were real­ized and sent off to India, but the project and the third bird were never completed. Cantor gives the story a happier end­ing by hon­or­ing Bran­cusi’s orig­inal inten­tion and produc­ing three Future Gifts.

Cioca’s Inner Voice, which reveals two porce­lain doves, one seem­ingly burst­ing forth from the other, also plays to the poetic, as does Vanga with her sub­tle but poignantly per­sonal ref­er­ence to the fam­ily unit and its inter­ac­tion with the world around it, through a flower made from her fam­ily’s shoes. A stencil traced in pig­ment symbol­izes the paths that criss­cross between those within the fam­ily and those enter­ing from out­side, reinforc­ing the notion of the con­stant state of flux in the pri­vate ’safe’ realm of home and the unpre­dictable nature of what might lie out­side in the wider world. Ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary pop­u­lar cul­ture are also pre­sent in the exhi­bi­tion. For exam­ple, Cantor’s most recent work, Hypo­thet­ical Ger­i­atric Selfie (2014), engages with the notion of the selfie in the form of a giant star, hand-carved and drilled into the wall of the oth­er­wise pris­tine gallery. The title sug­gests two interpreta­tions. On the one hand, it is evoca­tive of an ancient and per­sis­tent symbol carved by the artist so as to tell who­ever dis­cov­ers it, ’I was here’. On the other, it reminds us that we some­times see the light from a star which, because of the speed at which light trav­els, no longer exists—leav­ing us looking at an old and empty space.

In Cluj Connec­tion 3D, sculp­ture, as a delib­er­ate act of decon­struc­tion in the structural­ist sense, bal­ances with surre­al­ist-inspired, dream­like visions of twisted metal that evoke draw­ing in space rather than solid or con­crete forms. Inter­est­ingly, the interplay of coolly con­trived objects with playful con­struc­tions, hard-hitt­ing installa­tions with humor­ous or ironic inter­ven­tions, and a gen­eral min­gling of influ­ences and varying artis­tic con­cerns, is very much in keep­ing with the vibrancy of the cultural background of Cluj itself. Histor­ically, the city has always been mul­ti­cultural, chal­leng­ing and labile. Sit­u­ated approx­i­mately halfway between Bucharest and Budapest, and with a diverse pop­u­la­tion of Hungar­i­ans, Saxons and Jews - as well as the now predom­inant Roma­ni­ans, Cluj has long been a crossroads for peoples and empires, and, like the rest of Tran­sylva­nia, a cultural heart­land.

Jane Neal is a lead­ing expert on the con­tem­po­rary art scene in Eastern Europe, writes for a var­i­ety of interna­tional pub­lica­tions and recently co-authored Cities of the Future: 21 Century Avant Gardes (Phaidon). She has curated crit­ically acclaimed exhi­bi­tions in Austin, Berlin, Budapest, Dubai, London, Los Ange­les, Milan, Mumbai, New York, Prague, and Zurich. Recent exhi­bi­tions include a Euro­pean fig­u­ra­tive paint­ing show for S/2 in London enti­tled „This Side of Par­adise“ (2014) and „Nightfall: New Ten­dencies in Fig­u­ra­tive Paint­ing“ at MODEM Centre for Con­tem­po­rary Arts, Debre­cen, Hungary (2012), which trav­eled to the Rudolfinum in Prague in 2013. Neal was edu­cated at Oxford Uni­ver­sity and the Courtauld Institute, London, and lives and works in Oxford and London.

Press Contact:
David Ulrichs, david@david-ulrichs.com

Opening: Friday 6 February 2015

Galerie Judin
Potsdamer Strasse 83
Berlin

IN ARCHIVIO [10]
Philipp Furhofer
dal 29/4/2015 al 26/6/2015

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