Art Matters | A Medieval Romanian City With Major Art Talent
by Zeke Turner
Lacking a famous art school, government support or even a location most people can point to on a map, the small medieval city of Cluj, Romania, has become an unlikely breeding ground for the next generation of art stars. Two years ago, the painter Adrian Ghenie was in his friend’s studio, having a coffee with some former classmates — all Romanian artists and gallerists in their mid-to-late 30s — when it sunk in: they had made it.
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Exhibition Review
By Brian Boucher
Utopians often have a hard time of it in Ciprian Mureşan’s work. The Romanian artist’s hilarious photograph Leap into the Void—after 3 Seconds (2004) mimics Yves Klein’s classic image of the artist in a swan dive from a rooftop. Mureşan’s abject version shows a similar street, a man’s body sprawled on the pavement—the aftermath of a moment of glorious flight. Flight his recent show at David Nolan, his first New York solo, Mureşan (b. 1977) continued sending up utopian artists, though perhaps treating them more gently, while also introducing themes of translation and transmission of knowledge and ideologies.
Ciprian Mureşan
By Siona Wilson
In Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan’s first US solo exhibition, I caught myself thinking about E.H. Gombrich’s 1960 art history classic Art and Illusion, an unfashionable book that could very well have appeared in the show alongside other volumes featured in the artist’s pedagogically themed films and sculptural works. Addressing the question of style and mimesis, Gombrich recounts a little-known German artist’s memory from the 1820s about a group of fellow art students—friends—out sketching in Tivoli. Each one was bent in youthful earnestness upon the faithful and objective rendering of the landscape. But when comparing their finished sketches, they discovered that, rather than displaying the objectivity of straightforward imitation, he works revealed immediately apparent individual styles, readable like each of their personalities.
Art in Review: Ciprian Muresan
By Holland Cotter
Ciprian Muresan, born in 1977, is one of several remarkable young Romanian artists (Mircea Cantor and Serban Savu are others) who were on the verge of their teens at the time of the 1989 revolution, and adults during the period of confused politics and disappointed ideals that followed.
Ciprian Mureşan
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Galeria Plan B, Berlin, Germany
By Mitch Speed
In the midst of an unseasonably hot Berlin summer, Patriarch Teoctist, former head of the Romanian Orthodox church, found himself pinned between a stray meteorite and the floor of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. This blasphemous tableau, The End of the Five-Year Plan (2004), is Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan’s interpretation of Maurizio Catellan’s La Nona Orta (The Ninth Hour, 1999), in which Pope John Paul II is felled by a meteorite. Teoctist’s inert body lay opposite Incorrigible Believers (2009), an arrangement of eight black pews and an altar, topped with an open copy of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle (1926).