13 Nov 2014

Vlad Nanca at Boccanera Gallery, Trento

Boccanera is delighted to present Romanian artist Vlad Nancă's first solo exhibition in Italy. This show will center upon Nancă's long-term engrossment in 70's knick knacks, decors, interior designs, texts, and propaganda materials. The exhibition's title, That '70s Show, borrowed from the homonymous American sitcom, is setting the tone for this unprecedented meeting between Arte Povera and the 70's bling and glitz or, even better, between ostalgie and nostalgia.

It is not the first time when Vlad Nancă is using the retrospective voice within his work. While revising the past - gathering oddments, collecting clichés, and further pressing them all against a new matrix - he is actually feeding the now in a similar way extrapolation may be used to design the future. Popular culture, personal histories, folklore, national icons become inextricably intertwined, body of a work that is equally appropriate(d) and playful. Collecting is turned into a creative tool, as Nancă – the urban semiologist and ideological contortionist – forces all his anthologies in.

That '70s Show becomes a hybrid Flea-Market- Crystal-Palace, or rather a garden of surprises decorated in a modernist vein - with porcelain polar bears (replicas of Francois Pompon's famous Art Deco 'L'Ours Blanc'), Brancusian sculptures, crystal light fixtures, a ceramic tiles mobile (an homage to Hans Hollein's 1972 Austrian Pavillion at the Venice Biennial and to the work of Jean-Pierre Raynaud), and a bittersweet slideshow. It is Vlad Nancă's version of the nowness of art.

Vlad Nancă (1979) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. His various projects employ different mediums, as well as diverse social and cultural symbols, often including word-play, to evoke nostalgia, reference Romania's recent past, and challenge the current cultural climate. Among many other group shows, Nancă's work has been included in A few grams of Red, Yellow, Blue, at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2014); Image to be projected until it vanishes at Museion in Bolzano (2011); DEMOC(K)RACY 1 at La Criée, Centre d'Art Contemporain Rennes (2011).