Four monumental sculptures, made by artists Dan Vișovan and Bogdan Rață, welcome visitors at the entrance of the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Part of the Urbanology exhibition – the “cut sculptures”, as the two sculptors call them, are part of an urban project initiated in 2022 through which the artists reinterpreted the relationship between the city and nature, through wood, cut into unique shapes, which reveals the centuries-old history of some centuries-old oak trees in the parks of Timișoara, saved and recovered through artistic means, at the initiative of the two.
“The word urbanology does not exist for real, and precisely because of that it can mean a lot of things. In our particular case, “a spontaneous act of archaeologically recuperating a specific layer of the city in development”.
Dan Vișovan is an urbanologist in the same way Monsieur Jourdain was a prose maker. He became that due to some simple facts of life. First, Vișovan is a sculptor and a manufacturer specialised in, and having a passion for wood. Second, he is the dweller of one of the most amazing studios, a time capsule from the last century, when sculptors were able, even in communist Romania, to squat large patches of land in the proximity of the cities, and to build out there zones of autonomy. Third, Vișovan seized the opportunity offered by the city of Timișoara when the local administration decided to cut a number of centenary oak trees too sick to be saved.
Therefore the corpses of those veterans of the city were taken to his open studio, where Bogdan Rața and Dan Vișovan played with those fallen monsters by cutting them in various forms. Started together with several other colleagues as a jam session, the process became an ongoing performance of the two friends, due to the challenge offered by MNAC. I was fascinated by their spontaneous way of recycling the city through art and wanted to share my fascination with the visitors of this Museum—itself a result of multiple recycling stages, some negative, some not. I hope the lessons of the Rața-Vișovan Urbanology will be well taken.”— Călin Dan, curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition can be visited in the Museum entrance area until September 29, 2024.
