22 Nov 2008

Ion Grigorescu at Galleria ARTRA

Ion Grigorescu

curated by Ruxandra Balaci and Marco Scotini

The ARTRA Gallery is pleased to present the first comprehensive Italian retrospective of the work of the great Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu, having already anticipated his work in the collective shows Revolution Reloaded (2004) and October (2007).

From the Seventies on, Ion Grigorescu emerged as one of the most complex and important artists in the Romanian artistic and intellectual world, and after 1989 he made his presence felt on the international scene by participating in events such as the 47th Venice Biennale, Periferic Biennial 6, Prague Biennale 3, to Documenta 12, when his work was exhibited both at the Fridericianum Museum and at the Aue Pavilion.

Although Ion Grigorescu, born in Bucharest in 1945, was working as an artist during the period of maximum nationalistic extremism under the communist regime of Ceausescu, he was alert to the most innovative developments in Western art, which he filtered through a complex and culturally stratified cultural background. His great vocation for experimentation has allowed him an unconditioned freedom, stronger than in much other Western art, which has led him to continually explore diverse areas, such as psychoanalytic theory, the public sphere, and both abstract-metaphysical and realistic-political dimensions.

For Ion Grigorescu there is a clear correlation between art and behaviour: his existentialist paradigm is imposed onto the artistic, suggesting an identity crisis of the self – pushed to its furthest limits during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime – as the main activity of his conceptual system. From the early 1970s he began using various media: painting, photography, film, installation and performance, seeking to pose questions about a tragic identity, concerned as much with private identity as with the national one. Art became a question of survival and resistance. Simple, rough, waste materials, 'bad painting', irony, nihilism and a reaction against the conventions have fed personal mythologies. Echoes of a sick society became the main themes of his work: the representation of the manipulated masses and minorities, the denouncing of political discussion, the attitude of individual repression (even allowing himself shades of the psychotic).

The examination of poverty, insecurity, the ephemeral and alleged asceticism – which can be traced to a concept of the art of destruction and Viennese Actionism – is clear within the conceptualization of the monstrosity of ordinary life and the dejection produced by a continual Manichean struggle.

The exploration of the physical limits of his own body in the performances of the Seventies, as well as an apparently blasphemous use of sexuality; the sense of solidarity and social participation in the photos and the 'Pasolini-like' desolation of the videos on Bucharest, and again, the attempt to act as a disruptive element in a society based on control, to the point of establishing daily models of resistance, make him one of the most interesting artists of the contemporary scene in its biopolitical sense.