The collective exhibition curated by Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu, Until death do us part, will open to the public on Saturday, July 6, 2024, starting at 6:00 p.m. at The Institute Gallery in the premises of the Fondului Plastic Complex (Băiculești street no. 29).

“We, ones of today should be grateful and must understand that all we are, we owe to those who, before us, crossed history and (in)scribed the signs of civilization in the DNA of knowledge, laid the foundations of our humanity. Layer after layer, leaps forward, of accumulations, of information have shaped us into what we became today. Now timeless, universal, spiritual, in the body and with the attention directed to the self, to the world, to the boundless.

We owe to the cultures, the myths, the heresies, the beliefs that traversed and shaped human history, the science and knowledge that have reached us. We have built ourselves by spirit, observation and deed together with the paths of the stars in the firmament of the sky, with the eruptions of volcanoes in the soul of the earth, with the rain clouds, with the goodness of the day and the shadow of the night, with the fire and the wheel, the animals and the medicinal plants, the voice that spells, with our angels and demons, gods and viruses, and we were born and we grew up and it was good, and we died imperturbably on the scale of infinity, equal before divinity and destiny, the same day after day, generation after generation, millennium after the millennium.

Our obsession is the need to explain the helplessness, to understand otherness, what is foreign to the eye, the thought, the senses, what could be beyond, the death of the body (maybe even of the soul, or…?).
Of all the mysteries of the world and the universe, perhaps the most important to our transient order of things is that of the passing away.
There are no words, images or thoughts that can sufficiently tell about this crossing through life and sliding into death, about the passing beyond, about this fabric from which the universe is made and of which we are also a part. Death is seen as a separation from all the things we love, but also as a fundamental mystery.

Fifty-six artists are exhibiting artworks that narrate, and analyze the personal relationship with the death. In the Western civilization, the death resembles with the separation from the world, from the others, from the beauties of the day and the pleasures of the night, from the good and the bad, from the loved ones, from our professional life. With horror, with regret, with desire, with detached understanding of fatality or Christian wisdom, we all deeply relate to this passage.
Art is a fiber from the fabric with which the existence and civilization of the human species are made, creation and birth put death into perspective, illusory postpone it a little, we leave a trace, we trick (un)death a little more. The aforementioned exhibition, organized at The Institute gallery, illustrates this through the works of artists who reflect on death, continuing a previously started dialogue about eroticism, love and sexuality.

In the summer of 2022 in the same generous space of The Institute Gallery, a collective of artists exhibited creations about eroticism and sexuality, source of life and pleasure, today the existential pendant, the subject treated in this exhibition is the death. Lust is in the Air versus Until Death do us Part; this common phrase is said between the bride and groom at a Christian wedding, which indicates the commitment in a fundamental union.

This exhibition brings together diverse and intimate perspectives on death, allowing us to better understand the artists’ individual fears, acceptances and reflections on the end of life. Through the creations, the artists not only explore their own feelings and thoughts about death, but also offer viewers the opportunity to ponder their own mortality. a collective work that integrate a series of plaques similar to those memento mori, photos of the deceased on crosses in Romanian cemeteries. The artists were invited to produce an object of the shape and size of that plate on which to express an idea about death, about oneself, about the little death or about the end of time. The technique was at the choice of each artist, but some of them chose to work in burnt and glazed clay, to be as suggestive as possible with the plaques on the crosses. It’s a playful way, somehow to cheat death, to laugh at it, even during life. Together the exposure in a small, local gesture of solidarity emphasizes the contrast between the ephemerality of life and the permanence of unique or collective memory.”
Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu

The exhibition will be open from July 6 to August 1, 2024.

Event organized with the support of The Institute gallery and the Union of Visual Artists from Romania.