140 years after his birth, we shed new light on the modernist giant through a thought-provoking exhibition of drawings by artist Raluca Popa, curated by Simona Nastac, and complemented by a talk in the company of art historian Doina Lemny, the author of the seminal 'Brancusi – an Artist without Frontiers'.
Using a wide range of sources, including two of the most relevant monographs ever written on Brâncuși – Sanda Miller’s 'Brancusi' (Reaktion Books, 2010) and Doina Lemny’s 'Brancusi – an Artist without Frontiers' (Noi Media Print, 2016), Raluca Popa recreates, through drawing, a fresh and vivid portrait of the great Romanian sculptor. By filtering, subverting, erasing and overlaying his memories and traces, equally long-familiar and less known, she captures Brâncuși's presence as it echoes through his correspondence, notes, photographs and footage of his studio.
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) was one of the pioneering figures of modern sculpture and one of the most original artists of the twentieth-century. His serenely simplified sculptures ‘Bird in Space’, ‘Mlle Pogany’ or ‘Sleeping Muse’ are unanimously recognised as icons of modernism and looking at his art now, it is almost impossible not to see him as a precursor to surrealism, and to more recent work as diverse as that of Hepworth and Moore, Anish Kapoor and Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Louise Bourgeois. He was a remarkably protean figure, also a close friend to leading avant-garde artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Erik Satie among others, yet he remains one of the most elusive, with an aura of otherness still intriguing today.
This event is supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute.
More information here.
