ICR Romanian Cultural Institute London

Exhibition: In the Light of Utopia

              

The Romanian Cultural Institute presents In the Light of Utopia, a rare exhibition of painting, sculpture and installation work from pivotal figures of Romanian experimental art of the late 1960s, exploring the human body and its existence as matter in nature and space. The ground-breaking visions of illustrious Timisoara-based artists Stefan Bertalan (b.1930), Constantin Flondor (b.1936), Doru Tulcan (b.1943) (at a certain moment, all members of the internationally acknowledged Sigma group), Paul Neagu (1938 - 2004) and Roman Cotosman (1935-2006) are playfully confronted by their today's followers Liliana Mercioiu-Popa (b.1975), Sorin Neamtu (b.1977) and Sasha-Liviu Stoianovici (b.1978), who address notions of humanism, language and technology in the modern world.

The exhibition is curated by Ileana Pintilie, following her residency within the Attic Arts programme at the RCI London in 2010.

"The removal of the surrounding world's mimetic imitation occurred in Romanian art in the late 1960s, in the communist context, thanks to artists who exploited this direction as a new, unknown, sometimes risky path to take. Their conceptual and visual research, initially put aside by the others, had a considerable impact later in the artistic milieus. For a group of Timisoara-based artists, the ideas and visual concepts took the form of utopia. It would be impossible to define otherwise Paul Neagu's view on the inner structure of the human body, which corresponds to a macro hierarchy of the universe. Or the holistic character of the artistic process developed by Bertalan, Flondor and Tulcan, or the purely geometrical structure of Roman Cotosman's forms-concepts."
Ileana Pintilie

Featured artists' biographies (Word document).

Ileana Pintilie is an art critic and curator, professor at the Arts University in Timisoara, Romania. Her books include Actionism in Romania During the Communist Era and the volume Mitteleuropäische Paradigmen in Südosteuropa. Ein Beitrag zur Kultur der Deutschen im Banat (with Roxana Nubert). She has also published a number of articles and essays on contemporary art in Romania and abroad in international catalogues and volumes. In 1994 Pintilie won a National Award for Art Criticism. She is a contributing editor of ARTMargins. She organised and curated the performance art festival Zona in Timisoara, as well as many solo and group exhibitions in Romania and abroad.

When: 14 June - 14 July. Opening: Tuesday 14 June, 6.30 - 8.30pm.
Visiting hours: Monday - Friday | 10am - 5pm.
Where: Romanian Cultural Institute London.
Free entry.