Marilena Preda Sânc: ‘Bodyscape 1982–1988’ focuses on works from the 1980s – a pivotal decade in the artist’s career. Including a large number of collages, photographs with interventions, and drawings that have never been showed before, the exhibition highlights a brave, experimental artistic practice that openly expressed Marilena Preda Sânc’s experiences as a woman, despite the oppressive climate of the era. This is her third solo show with Gaep.
“Marilena Preda Sânc’s exhibition at Gaep offers a compelling insight into a decisive decade of artistic resistance and introspection. (…) The works on view reveal the interplay between corporeal and spatial dimensions in her practice, while also anticipating the ecofeminist concerns that resonate in today’s global discourse. From her early engagement with feminism, nature, and power structures, Preda Sânc’s 1980s works stand out as both historical documents and ongoing meditations on the human condition – urgently relevant to our present times.” — Anna Daneri, curator
“Communist ideology, with its coercive system, could not fully penetrate the intimacy of the artistic process. There was this duality – inner freedom on one side, and a restrictive socio-political context on the other – that pushed the artist toward introspection, keen observation, retreat into nature, nature as subject and the being as consciousness. The body, in turn, became a medium.” — Marilena Preda Sânc in conversation with Anna Daneri
The exhibition is on view until 25 October 2025.
MARILENA PREDA SÂNC (b. 1955, lives and works in Bucharest) is an interdisciplinary artist, professor at The National University of Arts in Bucharest and the author of several texts on art in public spaces, feminism and eco-art. Beginning with 1980, her work – across the mediums of painting, drawing, collage, video, and performance – has been presented internationally in museums, galleries, biennales and art fairs. Public collections that feature her works include: The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Arhitekturni Muzej Ljubljana; Kunsthalle, Nurenberg; Albertina Art Collections, Vienna. In 2004 she received “The Cultural Merit” Order and medal. In 2017 she won the Sardi per l’arte Back to the Future Special Mention at Artissima, Turin (with Gaep) and in 2020 – Radio România Cultural Award, Visual Arts category, for her solo exhibition Subjective (De)Constructions (also with Gaep, 2019). Her first solo show at Gaep was but IT Got Too COLD (2015).
ANNA DANERI is an independent curator. She recently curated Nothing Is Lost. Art and Matter in Transformation (GAMeC, Bergamo, 2021-2022, together with Lorenzo Giusti) and Claire Fontaine. Your Money and Your Life (Palazzo Ducale, Genoa/Galerias Municipais, Lisbon, 2019-2020), among other exhibitions. She was one of the founders of Peep-Hole Art Center, Milan (2009-2016) and since 2013 she has been responsible of Meru Art*Science Research Program. Daneri was Production Manager of Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word (2015) in the US Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and worked on several transdisciplinary collective research projects such as Io sono confine/I Am Border (Genoa, 2023) and TEU (Twenty–foot Equivalent Unit) promoted by On Public and Disfor University of Genova (Genoa, 2017). She is part of the collective of artistic research Corpi Idrici and of the committee Archivio Atelier Pharaildis Van den Broeck. Since 2020 she is artistic co-director of Electropark festival.
