MARe will open on Friday, May 10, the group exhibition “Images of solitude. Works from the MARe collection”, curated by Ioana Iuna Şerban.

“Is solitude a state of grace? Is it a functional state?

Each time, the solitude we are presented with by another seems to become the symbol of a state we recognize, even if we haven’t experienced that side of it before. And there are so many sides to it, voluntary or involuntary, benign or tumultuous. And the symbols we extract from the solitude represented by others can sometimes resemble sentences drawn from a motivational book where loneliness is nothing more than a joyful exercise, an exercise for creative geniuses, an exercise for self-made people.

In this exhibition, we set out to examine instances of solitude – through and beyond the stereotypical – in works from the MARe collection. Given that art – in all its forms – is a favoured medium for this condition with its whole associated spectrum of emotions and anomalies, it’s only natural that we stop and think about this intimacy that artists simultaneously depict and obscure. Van Gogh’s room, repainted by Bogdan Vlăduță, is the refracted story of every artist’s solitude and about the simplicity of human life; solitude reorganizes through distortion and reassembling, through an abyssal sharpness, identity garners various tonalities in the work of Florin Mitroi, Aniela Firon, and Ștefan Bertalan; for Andrei Chintilă, solitude seems to be an act of faith and arrogance in the face of a malign society that rushes to label you as crazy; in the work of Doru Covrig and Larisa Sitar, enmeshment, numbness, and the gradual erasure of traits and the world amount to an expression of solitude as the final frontier of language; is it solitude or is it just: the seductiveness of vice (for Naiana Vatavu), prayer (for Michele Bressan), a soliloquy of illness (for Ecaterina Vrana), the agony of the other in the face of the human condition (for Daniel Djamo)? The step beyond any point of reference into the isolation of the cosmos from George Anghelescu’s work is dampened in the serene sunset that Alina Feneș’s impersonal, robotic, untroubled character watches.

Each of these instances of solitude reveals a complex back-and-forth between the inner experiences that, as a consequence of the society we live in, no status quo of the imaginary could possibly contain.

Part of the aim of the Museum of Recent Art is to investigate various prescient themes and subjects in Romanian society through the works in our collection. Thus, this gift-exhibition – occupying the museum’s third floor and the spaces between floors – offers a moment of reflection by tracing a journey of initiation through the forms of this unsettling state that we yearn for so strongly.”(excerpt from the curatorial text)

The exhibition will be open for visitation from May 10 to May 19, 2024.

Photo credits: Alexandru Paul