The group exhibition “merge,” from Semtovici & Benowitz Gallery, curated by Ecaterina Scemtovici, features artists: Anca Bârjovanu, Alina Bobeică, Robert Catrina, Lena Ciobanu, Ana Maria Dranga, Luca Florian, Anne Ivan, Anna Laza, Irina Marinescu, Tudor Necula, Ana Popa, Alexandru Ranga, Andreea Rechițean, Theresa Roxburgh, and Darya Uğur Eroğlu.
Organized in collaboration with the architecture and design firm SHAFTOrg, the exhibition presents a selection of fine and decorative artworks, including painting, sculpture, photography, installations, and textile art.
“Once individual property reaches the exterior, it adapts to the interior and turns outward once more. The shadow of each person projects itself outside, calculating and carrying the privileged point — the point where light becomes perfect. The exhibition “merge,” explores the dynamics of space and identity in relation to light and non-light. The brick installation represents a neutral space intended to restore the relationship between artworks and the topos that hosts them.
The exhibition path highlights moments or memories from everyday life — visual fragments archived by memory from the day-to-day. The exterior gradually enters the inner comfort, the intimacy. The connection between the formal world and the world from which the materials of the exhibited objects originate — earth, roots and bulbs, textile fibers, metals, marble — becomes fully intelligible at the end of the journey, through visual contact with each object. Thus, the path signifies a search through which the virtual touch of external objects influences the inner.
This logic of the construct generates a dynamic in which marginal components are displaced outwardly, while the viewer is placed among the exhibited elements — the exhibition construct practically envelops the viewer’s body. Consequently, the alien elements, foreign to the human body, become parts of it. The exhibition is conceived as a game unfolding between parentheses — within a space where extrinsic material value and intrinsic human identity amplify one another.” — Ecaterina Scemtovici, curator
Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery is a Bucharest gallery inaugurated in December 2022, with a mission to support the art scene and enhance the value of Romanian artists both on the local and international market. The gallery maintains a consistent and ambitious artistic program in collaboration with the Art Movements Foundation. The Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery space spans on the two levels of a building constructed in the late 1920s, restored and adapted to host contemporary art and events dedicated to the public, the creative sector, and the entrepreneurial environment.
The exhibition is open until November 2, 2025, at the gallery on Jean-Louis Calderon Street no. 34, every Friday and Saturday from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM, and Sunday from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM.
