Ion Grigorescu show in Vienna
“L’Homme – Centre de l’Univers” by Ion Grigorescu, one of the most important contemporary Romanian artists, marks the artist’s 80th birthday at the Gregor Podnar Gallery Vienna. The opening takes place on the evening of April 8 and the exhibition is open until May 31.
The exhibition, organized in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute in Vienna, is a dialogue between old and new works, and features photographs, sculpture, paintings and the film “L’Homme – Centre de l’Univers” by Ion Grigorescu.
“Ion Grigorescu’s choice of a French-language title for his film “L’Homme – Centre de l’Univers” shows the use of a masterful language that places the artist in a particular center of intellectual and artistic thought. In reality, however, Grigorescu’s groundbreaking artistic activities centered on communist Romania in the 1970s, which has determined his unique position as one of the few male artists to relate to the international discourse on body art and performance. Grigorescu, lying on a meadow in the middle of a Romanian landscape, positions the camera in a fish-eye fashion that makes the ground appear round and he appears to be the only human being on earth, with his legs and arms outstretched in various directions. The camera moves slowly, recording from different angles, as if through a porthole, over the artist’s clothes and body, as well as over an adjacent electricity pole in the middle of the landscape. Instead of staging live actions, the artist chose the camera or film camera to document his bodily performances, which place the self at the center of artistic expression,” explains Walter Seidl of the Kontact Collection, which owns a copy of the film.
About Ion Grigorescu
Ion Grigorescu was born in 1945 in Bucharest. He is one of the most important post-war Romanian artists. After studying at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, he worked as a drawing teacher and fresco restorer in Busteni and Bucharest until 1979.
Since 1967, he has focused on themes such as the body and politics. Particularly in the 1970s, self-searching and self-reflection became major themes for Grigorescu, naturally integrated into the context of repression and political restrictions in his native country. In response to the repression in Romania under Ceausescu, he did not protest vociferously, but withdrew from the public eye. By the late 1970s, Grigorescu began to document his performances with new means and devices, focusing on ritualized actions around his body. Public performance of body art was banned under Ceausescu, so events took place in private, sometimes even without an audience. His performances, experimental films, and photographs are restrained responses to the immediate realities of life. They reflect the splintered nature of society in the totalitarian state. In 1982, Grigorescu withdrew completely from the art scene. Until 1990 he devoted himself exclusively to restoring and redesigning church frescoes and learning the technique of religious painting.
After 1990, Ion Grigorescu’s work was increasingly shown in international exhibitions in Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Vienna, Kassel, Milan, Barcelona, Barcelona, Tokyo, Stuttgart, Lisbon, Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, Kassel, Milan, Tokyo, Stuttgart, Lisbon, Zurich and Berlin. The artist has also participated in the São Paulo, Cetinje and Venice Biennials.
Gregor Podnar is a contemporary art gallery established in 2003. It started in an industrial space in the small town of Kranj, surrounded by the picturesque landscape of the Slovenian Alps. The gallery moved to the city center of Ljubljana in 2005 and to Berlin, Germany, in 2007, before moving permanently to Vienna, Austria, in 2022. As a curator, Gregor Podnar has been working internationally since the mid-1990s, and the gallery’s program has developed out of his curatorial efforts in the field of contemporary art. Starting in a European context, the gallery has expanded into a broader international context (America) over the last decade, and has also focused on art from the modernist past, emphasizing a natural connection between contemporary and modern art.
Foto: Ion Grigorescu, „O singură cameră” (1980)
