Romanian catalog for Webpage - Flipbook - Page 19
Ciprian Mureşan,
Pioneers, 2008,
one of a series
of ten works,
illustrated page 93
in Romania ended and a new capitalist society was
forged. One of Mureşan’s most poignant series of works
is Pioneers (2008), ten drawings of children that initially
look as though they are innocently blowing up balloons,
but in fact are inhaling chemical solvents. The Pioneer
movement was the communist equivalent of the Boy
Scouts. When communism ended, thousands of children,
formerly looked after by the state, became homeless
almost overnight, sheltering in tunnels, begging or turning
to prostitution, and seeking temporary escape from their
reality through solvent abuse.
Like Mureşan, Dan Perjovschi draws — as a project in and
of itself, as a performance piece, and as an installation.
Unlike Mureşan, his works are usually simple, sketchedout motifs. Fluid, confident, and often pointedly funny,
Perjovschi’s work engages with current social and civic
issues. His wry statements and sketches so adeptly
capture the essence of a crisis that they are often
printed and used during protests. Over the past decade,
Perjovschi has created drawings in museum spaces,
including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
In 2009, he created his first permanent realization in the
Czech National Library of Technology in Prague. The work
consisted of two hundred monumental drawings on the
concrete walls of the building’s main atrium. The Arthur
Taubman Trust acquired Perjovschi’s sketchbook for this
project, with the original drawings used to create an
outdoor mural at the Taubman Museum of Art in 2009.
Cristi Pogăcean is one of the most thoughtful and
thought-provoking of the artists in the Collection of the
Arthur Taubman Trust. Again, in common with so many
of his Romanian contemporaries, a dark, wry humor
laces through his practice. Pogăcean works principally in
sculpture, but also in installation and film. His video 2544
involved the collaboration and direct participation of his
gallerist, Mihai Pop. The work should be accompanied
by this anecdote that Pop tells: “Pogo (Pogăcean) told
me, ‘You’re my gallerist, so take me to the top!’ And he
went away to produce a flag with his face on it, blown up
to poster size, lit from below, dictator-style, and he told
me, ‘You are going to carry this flag with my face on it
to the top of Moldoveanu Peak, which at 2,544 meters, is
the highest mountain in Romania, and I will film you and
we will present the video entitled 2544.’” So, Pop did as
he was bid, and took his artist to the top of the Făgăraș
Mountains in the Southern Carpathians while Pogăcean
filmed his journey.
Another of Pogăcean’s works in the Collection of the
Arthur Taubman Trust, The Abduction from the Seraglio
(2006), made it onto the front page of The New York
Times. Galeria Plan B in Cluj, Romania, was participating
in The Armory Show for the first time, and the Times’ art
critic Holland Cotter noted that there was “a woven rug
with a startling hostage scene” in the gallery’s booth.
Pogăcean had created a rug in keeping with the style of
carpet commonly found across Romanian homes, but
rather than the usual tapestry design, he had the image
of the Romanian journalists, kidnapped in Iraq, woven
onto it instead.
Gabriela Vanga is adept at taking an idea or notion and
presenting it in a new manner that seems so perfectly
plausible and beautifully simple that it is a wonder no
one had thought about this angle before. Intrigued by
time, space, and the hinterland between fiction and
reality, Vanga not only reconfigures existent possibilities,
she suggests concepts that do not, but should, exist.
The Collection of the Arthur Taubman Trust includes
her exquisitely simple glass feeding bottle titled Pavel
(2006). The work is named after Vanga’s first son with
her husband and fellow artist, Mircea Cantor. Inside the
bottle is an hourglass sand timer, poignantly evoking the
swift passing of infancy and serving as a memento mori
alluding to the existential crisis that new parenthood
brings about — that we are all born to die.
Mona Vӑtӑmanu and Florin Tudor have worked
together since 2000. Their practice is forged from an
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