Horia Damian

About

The artist’s second exhibition at Plan B Berlin includes a wide and essential selection of drawings, paintings and sculptures from different stages of his practice between the 1950s and the 2000s. From the 1970s Damian created monumental, symbolic sculptures giving them a metaphysical perspective that would distinguish them from the contemporary works of American Minimal Art. In 1975, he constructed The Hill for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Thomas Messer, the director of the Guggenheim Museum at that time, writes about Damian‘s works: ‘’in all of these, Damian aims for essentially the same results and all his concepts therefore have parallel meaning within his total oeuvre. Damian‘s art, based upon impeccable craftsmanship and an obsessive preoccupation with materials, cannot be faulted for lacking concreteness. But despite the sparseness and reductiveness of Damian‘s structures, minimal and formalistic interpretations do not suffice in this case. For his explicit references are to a celestial rather than a terrestrial space, to an ideal rather than a palpable world order, and to sacral rather than temporal realities.’’