Group Exhibitions
"Image Painting. Exit into „Reality”"
Quadro Gallery, Cluj, Romania
2018
Curators: Diana Marincu and Székely Sebestyén
Whether we speak about abstract or figurative painting, watercolor or oil on canvas, collage or drawing, the experiments of young artists have been doubled by a solid theoretical support. As Teodor Moraru, the artist celebrated by this award, said: ‘we can pass by forms, images and not see them as they are not part of our programme, they are not thought; painting needs to be, therefore, thought’. Keeping in mind this aspect of the tension between immediate reality and the visual language that processes and establishes it, we propose a re-composition of the five years of Teodor Moraru Award as seen in the practice of shortlisted artists from 2014 until today.
The revival of painting we notice today – or, as Hans Ulrich Obrist called this moment, the ‘urgency’ of painting from the point of view of the polyphonic voices it has brought to the international art scene, determines a wide interest in the development of this medium of expression and an increasing research of its engagement in contemporary society.
The exhibition builds on a game of visual abundancy that surrounds us today, in contrast with the stakes of painting to cut out its own reflexive and self-reflexive strip in the process of knowing and rediscovering visual language. Teodor Moraru revealed his working method as a permanent oscillation between studio analysis and exit into ‘reality’, going through documentation, specific to artistic explorations of his generation, for which the laboratory was not a perfect synonym of the studio. The laboratory included of course the studio, but went beyond the borders of its physical space and allowed for contamination from everything that reality imposed as an experience and as a specific subject.
The artists in the exhibition, all shortlisted for the first 5 editions of the Teodor Moraru Award, represent a wide strip of what young painting in Romania proposes today, while the exhibition offers the possibility of drawing out some networks that connect various practices, from both conceptual and geographical diverse areas, holding multiple instruments and fundaments.