The exhibition About Oneself Crosses and others/ Despre sine, cruci și altele is the first insert in the series of micro-histories and micro-memories at MNȚRplusC. The author of the exhibition, Mircea Modreanu, a visual artist with concerns in the space of both topographical and anthropomorphic volumetry, comes with a proposal resolved affectively by the personal route (micro-histories) – a soft memory that he recomposes in a simulacrum of hard memory ( sculptural objects in the installation), in the artist-run space in the basement of the Peasant Museum – the 1:1 scale reproduction of the crosses examined by the artist over several years of research, carried out including in the heart of the community of Momârlani in Petroșani, through the technique of the scroll on paper, inserted in plexiglass frames. The treatment of rural symbolism can be found in artists such as Mihai Olos, Napoleon Tiron, Maxim Dumitraș and many others.
“The exhibition essentially stages an artist’s game. By definition, the game is a symbol of struggle (with self, death, malevolent external forces, for sheer pleasure – for victory), which can also take on the appearance of an offering. Rarely unintentionally, the game bridges the gap between fantasy and reality. For the artist, the penchant for play evolved naturally over time. Hide-and-seek among the fir trees with grandpa as a child, the irresistible urge to complete another video game as a teenager, and the trivial, opaque and occasionally sloppy games of youth weighed in with the play of creation. Death, the ambiguous relationship between man and the transitory, the original community and small discoveries about worlds, cultures and civilizations are some of the offerings and game pieces that Mircea Modreanu transposes into works inspired by the Momârlan crosses in the Jiului Valley, by funerary stelae with runic inscriptions of Scandinavian origin, including iconographic sequences found on Trajan’s Column, thus correlating traditions, symbols and motifs in an unusual, dramatic, paradoxically optimistic universe.” Călina COMAN, curator
Mircea Modreanu is a visual artist, cultural project manager and gallerist. He attended the courses of the Faculty of Fine Arts at UAD Cluj, and immediately after completing his degree, he reconfigured his route to Bucharest. In 2014, he completed his master’s degree at UNArte’s graphics department, and a year later, he founded an NGO, representing his debut as an organizer of cultural projects.
Since 2018, when the E T A J artist-run space project was born, he has organized exhibitions in the space in Bucharest at 43 George Enescu Street, where he has invited over 200 artists to exhibit. In the lockdown, as a form of documentation and archiving, he started filming interviews with artists, which he uploaded to the YouTube channel ETAJ TV; Mircea is the coordinator of E T A J Magazine, a publication launched out of the desire to promote contemporary art and local artists. From 2021, Mircea presents the Romanian artist-run scene internationally, participating in art fairs for independent initiatives in Aarhus, Stockholm, Budapest, Madrid, Milan, Los Angeles and Ciudad de Mexico.
