Publications

Graphic Design: Daniel & Andrew Design Studio (Andrei Turenici)

Language: English/ Romanian
Pages: 512
ISBN: 978-973-0-34823-1

Supported by: Kontakt Collection Vienna, Diehl Gallery Berlin, Eleon Association, Constantin Flondor

I do one notebook for every show or project. It is like a pocket studio and research space. In the notebook drawings are pushed further to the limit and are not very PC. There are a lot of bad drawings, things that do not work out, lame jokes. Humour is hard to capture… Of the two hundred drawings in a notebook, thirty or fifty will make it onto the wall an maybe ten will make it into the general repertoire. The repertoire began in 2000 and since then drawings have been incorporated and discarded, rolling from one wall to the next.

Design:
Andrei Turenici (Daniel & Andrew Design Studio)

Image editing:
Serioja Bocsok, Aurelian Ardeleanu

Copy Editing and Proofreading:
Emmet Cooke, Diana Bularca, Alina Ioan

ISBN: 978-606-94536-8-1
Supported by: AFCN, individual donors

Ion Grigorescu’s Bucharest is a Bucharest lived and recorded subjectively, often dual (day and night), captured either by chance in the artist’s daily journey, or reimagined and rewritten by his dreams noted in the diary. It is a Bucharest that is gradually revealing itself, with its problems, with its limits, with its ruralized spaces on the edge of the prefabricated housing neighborhoods, a Bucharest of the gross remodeling after 1990.

Born in 1937 in Cluj, Lucian Meţianu belongs to the Romanian Neo‑avant‑garde music of the late 1960s. Preoccupied with the mathematical translation of sound, Meţianu develops a componis‑ tic thinking nurtured by the gravity of the referential centre, bringing back into discussion, together with other colleagues of his generation (Octavian Nemescu, Corneliu Cezar), the spectre of natural harmonics, the universal and the oscillation as a fundament of the world. In regards to the musical structure, he works with numerical ratios, particularly with the Fibonacci string and Lorentz equation with respect to the study of chaos and of unpredictability. Employing the idea of transformation…

Diet Sayler was born in 1939 at Timişoara and has lived in Nuremberg since 1973. He is one of the leading figures of the Romanian artistic Neo‑avant‑garde of the 1960s–1970s. Within this time period, he settled on a visual language deeply rooted in mathematics, architecture, movement, seriality and music, subjects which have been of an unceasing concern to him. Sensitive to the principles of constructivism and the synthetic theories of geometric abstraction, Diet Sayler has strived to develop an aesthetic of the “rigor,” translated in an operational system based on the dialectic of contrasts and on the introduction of a new constant: chance. His early series of works include…

Born in 1924 in Piatra Neamţ, Miriam Răducanu is considered one of the most influential Romanian artists, dancers and choreographers. Her choreographies fundamentally reshaped the vocabulary of contemporary dance in Romania by exploring the essentialisation of movement, the vivid and unsubordinated interconnection between different arts, thus leading towards an expanding of the notion of dance as a space for syncretism and dialogue between dancers, musicians, poets, actors. By using working principles originating in the German expressionism, to which multiple sources from the Romanian folklore, literature and theatre were added, her performative…

Octavian Nemescu was born in Paşcani in 1940. He is one of the leading figures of the Romanian avant‑garde composition school, his musical vision and grammar operating at a deeper level centered on retrieving the primordiality present in the spine of all musical traditions, with the aim of reaching a new artistic universality. Together with other colleagues from his generation, he is responsible for the emergence and development of the Romanian spectral music movement (Illuminations for Orchestra, 1967), of the isonic spectralism and, especially, the archetypal spectralism (Concentric, 1969), based on an aesthetic of essentialisation….

Born in 1945 in Bucharest, Ion Grigorescu is one of the most distinguished artists of the Romanian artistic Neo‑avant‑garde, being also a member of the Prolog group. Proposing a wide‑ranging corpus of works—from painting to photography, from body art to video performance, from painting of Orthodox churches to diary—which do not necessarily comply with the historical canons of art, Ion Grigorescu is permanently on the lookout for “roads and exits from roads.” Aiming to understand the subsidiary, but also subversive, role of art, the artist is strengthening art’s coming closer to one’s own life, to “mixed or unexplored fields,” seeking to call into question both the traditional…

Constantin Flondor, born in 1936 in Chernivtsi, is the creator of a series of landmark moments in the history of Romanian Neo‑avant‑garde art. Visibly distrustful of sheer subjectivity, his works stand out through their internalisation of the structuralist lesson, embodying microcosms, which adhere to a principle of order and systematic study of the world in which the artist breathes and contemplates. The strongly interdisciplinary nature of his activity, the new type of objectivity he investigated, and his experiments in the field of visual education have significantly changed the manner in which the artistic process and visual knowledge are understood. He is a founding member of…

Lia Perjovschi, born in 1961 in Sibiu, is the founder and coordinator of CAA/CAA—the Contemporary Art Archive/Center for Art Analysis, an infor‑ mal institution functioning under different names since 1985, and of KM—the Knowledge Museum, an interdisciplinary and educational project based on the research started by the artist in 1999 and continuing until today. Her activities and works—“International Archive for Contemporary Art 1990–today,” “The Center For Art Analysis 1999–today,” “Timeline 1997–today,” “Diagrams/Mind Maps 1999–today” and the “Knowledge Museum Project 1999–today”—define a series of registers in working with information…