ALEX MIRUTZIU and TAH29

About

Around the Truth is the Truth.

Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu explores the fringes of what can be seen or represented. His lightly rendered strokes, referred to as “homeless lines” by the artist, approach the portrayed objects without ever keenly contouring them.

This intended vagueness, leaving room for inconclusiveness, misunderstandings or the indefinable, is also palpable in the artists’ installations and performances. Mirutzius work surveys the periphery of things and inquires the possibilities of intervention into a fixed order.

Like many artists of his generation growing up in the former eastern bloc, Mirutziu names the wishfully observed culture of the west as an important reference point to his practice. Yet his escape route from the limitations of a post totalitarian Romania wasn’t shaped by the pop cultural iconography that we often see imprinted in contemporary visual aesthetics, but rather radical poetic and philosophical ideas.

Mirutzius interventions, inscribing bodies, overpainting photographs or installing objects resembling rearview mirrors, often feel crude, direct and brutal. They expose the relationship between concrete reality and subjective actuality as deceptive and constructed. Truth, as reflected in the title of this solo exhibition, is not understood as a moral or absolute category but as an empty center within a complex system of ascriptions, presumptions and fictionalizations.

In his piece „The urgency of the idea of closure in drawing“ Mirutziu will perform alongside his younger self, symbolized by a graphite mask, on the opening night. The project The Artist as Himself at 29 (TAH 29) focusses on the instability of self-narrations and the inevitable distortion of past events.

Diana Weis, 2018