Romanian catalog for Webpage - Flipbook - Page 12
Romania to specifically unite artists from Cluj. I was there
on a trip with my parents. It was my first time meeting
Jane, who became a fast, lifelong friend. I am sure I am
missing a few, but the artists I went on to work with from
the show were Ciprian Mureșan, Şerban Savu, Victor Man,
and Adrian Ghenie. I also had connected with artists
Dan and Lia Perjovschi. When I went to Cluj, I met all the
artists in an old square near the art conservatory where
they had studied together.
We sat in the old cobblestone square at a café that
night, drinking beers and getting to know each other. I
don’t recall if it was that time or the following one a few
months later when I went on studio visits. But after that
fateful evening, I met and visited the studios of Dan and
Lia Perjovschi, Ciprian Mureșan, and Şerban Savu. I recall
being extremely impressed by their level of sophistication,
knowledge, and elegance of conceptual thinking. All this
coming from a country with limited resources where it
had been dangerous to be curious beyond the “correct”
aesthetic school of thought. Times were changing for
them, though. Their post-Soviet world had opened up
as they shed their own historical grip of cultural and
personal traumas.
I remember a day on one of my visits when Mihai Pop was
showing me around the city. He took me to a high, green,
damp hillside overlooking many apartment buildings
and the city’s seemingly dangerous tangle of telephone
and cable wires. We drank a beer and talked under the
gray sky about work and life and art, a future project we
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very much wanted to collaborate on about the history of
contemporary Romanian art, but never did. It didn’t matter
because we got to know each other and become friends.
I recall my visit to Adrian Ghenie’s studio. There were
canvases with globs of paint merging into visages,
historical and ghostly, episodes in history that happened
in the West and central Europe. His studio space was dark
and moody. Who could have known the success he would
become within a few short years, or any of them? But it
was clear to me then that all of these artists deserved
a place in the contemporary canon of art anywhere and
most definitely in the West. I remember my father telling
me that he went to Adrian’s studio a few months after I
visited. I remember him telling me about the old building
and the relaxed artist’s studio, how different it was from
anything he was accustomed to experiencing in his daily
life. I always envisioned him going up the old, dirty
elevator to see the works and meeting Adrian.
Another gallerist took me to the city of Sibiu for a day
trip. The two-lane roads were terrifying as we raced
at breakneck speeds up to the mountain town in the
Transylvania region. Sibiu is where Dan Perjovschi grew
up. It is a striking place, where the architecture of the
town hasn’t changed for centuries, wonderfully unaffected
by time. It was very romantic, a setting for a fairytale.
I wanted to stay indefinitely to work myself into the fabric
of the town and know its stories.
I will never forget the day that Dan Perjovschi had his
