The group exhibition “I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky”, curated by Anastasia Palii, opens the exhibition season at the Anca Poterașu Gallery.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, March 1, from 6:00 p.m., at the Anca Poterașu Gallery located on Popa Soare 26, Bucharest.

Anca Poterașu Gallery’s first exhibition of this year presents “a visual dialogue between Oana Coșug and Yasmina Assbane, two artists exploring the image of the body as a cleavage between a deeply personal experience and a socio-cultural construct. The simultaneous perception of the body as subject and object is an endless play between the desire to “touch” and “be touched” in the works of both artists.

This ambivalence is embodied in a constant tension between the desire for touch and isolation, presence and absence, and extension and retrenchment. The fragile figure of the body takes the form of wavering and uncertain gestures emerging at the convergence of the uncanny and the ordinary. Fragility also suggests, in the conceptual realm of the image, the invasion of an inherent intimacy of the artistic object-subject that becomes vulnerable and susceptible in the act of viewing and contemplation.

Inspired by the literary work of Virginia Woolf, the title of the exhibition, “I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky”, brings back into the artistic discourse the subject of femininity and, in particular, the fragile dimension of sexuality, which “dissolves” in the artistic works by the force of exposure in an endless play of the gaze.

In her most recent drawings and paintings, Oana Coșug explores through watercolor and ink the boundaries of the touch of two bodies shaped between a discreet sensuality and overflowing anxiety. The body reveals itself as a spontaneous and balanced process, exposing a range of conflicting emotions.

Female and male characters are successively distorted and gradually take on fluid features and diffuse identities. The figures are detached and overlapped in such a way as to create an illusion of a blurred movement. Some characters are solitary and trapped in claustrophobic spaces. The others appear as anonymous couples constantly adjusting the relationship between self and other.

Yasmina Assbane questions the dominant perception of the women body as an object of decoration and consumption of the gaze. Her artistic approach is strongly rooted in the daily mundanity and in the material life of familiar objects essentially attributed to women. They are emptied of their primary function through dismantling and symbolic reconfiguration strategies. In her view, “although not all women are artists or writers, all women have the mastery of objects and stewardship”.

An important feature of her work, therefore, is the know-how acquired by women through the ‘art of the display’ and ‘arranging things’ in the domestic space, which the artist transfigures, in her vision, into an ‘aesthetic of retrenchment’: confinement into the space and materiality of those objects as a defensive strategy. Fragile, graceful and mysterious materials such as glass, mirror and textiles are the insertions of a female imaginary, dismantled and reassembled in a system of “fortification” of one’s own.” (curatorial text)

The exhibition can be visited until April 15, 2023. The entrance is free.

Oana Coşug (b. 1979 in Romania) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. She studied painting at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and then she decided to continue her studies in Brussels. In 2009 she obtained her master degree in Theory and Practice of Art at Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. She had numerous group shows in Brussels (B-Gallery, Galerie Actionfields, Art’Contest, Croxhapox in Gent, Galerie d’Ys and Artitude), and Bucharest (MNAC, Apollo, Assemblage Gallery, Căminul Artei, etc.).
Solo exhibitions (selection): Landscape (Artitude Gallery, Brussels, 2015), Drawings (ICR Tel Aviv, Israel, 2014), Paintings / Drawings (Visual Art Museum, Galaţi, 2012), Blue face (Artsenzafine Gallery, Milano, 2010), My shadow (Artsenzafine Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2008), ExPosition (Atelier 35, Bucharest). In 2012, she participates in the exhibition organized by CanvasCollectie / The RTBF Collection in Bozar. She was present in different art residencies (Destelheide, Tescani, Delta Dunării, Gent) and in 2012 she was awarded the First Prize in the International Biennial of Contemporary Drawing Namur, Belgium (ex aequo: Oana Coşug and Anya Belyat-Giunta).

Yasmina Assbane lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. She is a teacher for secondary school at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where she previously completed higher education in art. In 2004 and 2005 she took part in the Art Brussels Contemporary Art Fair on behalf of the Pascal Retelet Gallery (Olivier Meessen).
She had been part of many exhibitions in Greece, in Belgium in Ghent (SMAAK, curator by Ben Benaouisse), Mons, Charleroi, and Tournai, and took part in a residency at MAAC. She received several awards and grants: Charles Buls, Leg Serrure, Tournai City Prize, and Young Artists of the French Community Parliament. Her works are included in both private and public collections (Brussels Parliament).