Şoseaua Pavel D. Kiseleff 3, București

About

The exhibition essentially stages an artist's game. By definition, the game symbolizes a struggle (with oneself, with death, with malevolent external forces, or purely for the pleasure of victory), but it can also take on the aspect of an offering. Rarely unintentional, the game creates a bridge between fantasy and reality. For the artist, the taste for play has developed naturally over time. Hide-and-seek among the trees with his grandfather during childhood, the irresistible desire to finish another video game in adolescence, the trivial, opaque, and occasionally grimy games of youth—all have constantly stood in the balance with the game of creation. 

Death, the ambiguous relationship between man and the ephemeral, the originating community, small discoveries about the world, cultures, and civilizations, are some of those offerings and game pieces that Mircea Modreanu transposes in his works. Inspired by the Momarlan-esque crosses from the Jiu Valley, the funerary stelae with runic inscriptions of Scandinavian provenance, or even the iconographic sequences found on Trajan's Column, Modreanu correlates traditions, symbols, and motifs in an unwonted, dramatic – paradoxically optimistic – universe.

An alchemist in disguise, the artist sets up a place that gathers the world, bringing worlds together, and takes another fundamental symbol, shaping it in situ. The tree of life, Yggdrasil, an ash tree that in Norse tradition links all the three levels of the cosmos, is represented here as a game board. On the wooden planks, from one corner to the other, as a viewer, you walk through the creator's mind map, the places he has crossed and lingered over, becoming a spectator of his artistic acrobatics.

The project-destination culminates in a diverse presentation comprising three series of works: from drawings to 3D prints, video, and installation. Using an arsenal of heterogeneous materials, seemingly at odds with each other, such as Plexiglas, wood, plastic, and iron, Modreanu defies the conventional and further experiments with the possibility of a dialogue between memories, stories, personal mythologies, and stark materials, robust objects, towering elements.

(Calina Coman)

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Mircea Modreanu is a visual artist, cultural project manager and gallery owner. He attended the Faculty of Fine Arts at UAD Cluj, and immediately after graduating, he reconfigured his route to Bucharest. In 2014 he finished his master's degree at the graphic art department of UNArte and, a year later, founded an NGO, representing his debut as a cultural project organizer. Since 2018, when the E T A J artist-run space project was born, he has been organizing exhibitions in the Bucharest space at 43 George Enescu Street, where he has invited more than 200 artists so far. In lockdown, as a form of documentation and archiving, he started filming interviews with artists, which he uploaded on the youtube channel ETAJ TV; he is the coordinator of E T A J Magazine, a publication launched out of a desire to promote contemporary art and local artists. Since 2021 he presents the Romanian artist-run scene in the Romanian context internationally, participating in art fairs for independent initiatives in Aarhus, Stockholm, Budapest, Madrid, Milan, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Călina Coman is an independent curator, researcher and art critic living and working in Bucharest. She is a mamber of the ETAJ collective and an editor of the namesake magazine. She graduated with a degree in Art History and Theory and pursued a master's in Visual and Curatorial Studies, focusing her research on light as a dispositif in visual culture. She actively publishes articles in specialized art publications and dedicates her efforts to researching and nurturing the local artistic community, while also engaging with international independent initiatives.