Új Kriterion Gallery in Miercurea Ciuc opened recently Gendered Blood, an exhibition by Magdalena Pelmuș—an artistic inquiry into the body, identity, and symbolic violence embedded in gender structures. Curated by Adriana Oprea, the exhibition offers a critical reflection on how blood becomes a carrier of memory, power, and vulnerability, articulating contemporary social and political tension
“Fragile Anatomy, the paradoxical objects of Magdalena Pelmuș, consistently move forward what is happening in her painting and filmed performances. An even more recent sub-series of works from recent years assembled in Gendered Blood exhibition, places the same issues of body and nature at the center, now openly related to tissues (bodily organs) and “weaves” (sewn objects), through the medium of beaded tools-weapons-anatomies that locate the artist’s dual topic, one could say, between biology and jewelry. Following a rather untrue-to-material spirit, Magdalena Pelmuș’s self-contradictory weapons and anatomies incite – through their strange, hard preciousness – fear and attraction, fascination and aversion at the same time. Sumptuous and brutal at the same time, the artworks create a semantic and emotional ambiguity with a theatrical, queer, deviant air, with which the artist had already played by bringing to the stage shiny accessories, blood stains, golden backgrounds, tears, black and white veils – equally vulgar and sumptuous ingredients of her previous projects and series of works (Small Step. Falling, Identity Angst, Horizon).
The blood red dresses the works in a primordial color rather negatively connoted throughout history (as warning and danger, sin and punishment), being itself an older recognizable presence in the artist’s practice that marks in the Fragile Anatomy series, perhaps more directly than before, the body as a wound. An ambivalent vehicle of the soul and sacrifice, the “blood” of the works metaphorically displays its color associated with life and power while inspiring at the same time the opposite: death, infirmity, suffering and disfigurement. The generic human blood, which the red beaded objects indicate, signals the biological thresholds of female bodies as well, bringing in this case also a greater charge than the other bodily “humors” because it unites two crucial criteria of differentiation in a single reality: on the one hand, between genders and on the other, between life and death as such. Bodily fluid and bodily waste, in Fragile Anatomy maternal blood envelops paternal weapons, in the same sense that the feminized bodily anatomies and the artifacts of masculinized strength and power in Gendered Blood fuel the same polar dynamic between fusion and separation, pleasure and fear, communion and domination, under a beautiful theme that promises to become perhaps the favorite topic of an artist stepping unhesitatingly towards the middle of her professional career.” (curatorial text)
Adriana Oprea
The exhibition can be visited from December 16, 2025 to February 10, 2026 at Új Kriterion Gallery, 4 Petőfi Street, Miercurea Ciuc.
