The exhibition Self-Portrait. Nicolae Comănescu, hosted at Maria Lahovary House (39 Calea Dorobanți), transforms the space into a setting for reflection on the artist’s identity as a practice, gesture, and ongoing construction. Organized by MARe / Museum of Recent Art in partnership with H’art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Space (SAC), the exhibition brings together works by Nicolae Comănescu and proposes an exploration of the self-portrait as an unstable territory, shaped by memory, accumulation, and rewriting. Curated by Charles Moore, with curatorial assistance from Elena Est, the exhibition creates a dialogue between self-image and its cultural and biographical layers, in a visual journey that reconfigures the idea of artistic presence.
„Self Portrait positions portraiture as accumulation rather than representation. Through hundreds of encounters with others, Nicolae Comănescu constructs a dispersed image of the self that forms through time. Figures dissolve into layered surfaces built from textiles, found supports, and dense fields of paint, as each work accumulates a trace of an encounter. A portrait and a fragment form a collective self-portrait and social archive shaped by time and presence. Here, identity is not singular, contingent, extending across an evolving image rather than resolving into one.
(…)The works resist singular narratives, instead holding multiple, often contradictory realities in tension. The political and mundane circulate simultaneously, embedded within the same material field.
Emerging within this shifting terrain of Romania at the end of the 20th century, Comănescu developed a practice attuned to contradiction. That tension persists in Self Portrait, where accrual functions both as a method of grounding and a means of escape. The works are dense, often overwhelming in their material presence, yet they resist closure. There is no final image, no definitive statement of identity. Instead, the exhibition proposes a different understanding of the self, not as a coherent or singular entity, but as something formed through relation and time.”— Charles Moore / Curator
„Comănescu views the theme of ‘the painter’s reflection in the portrait,’ so debated in art history, through a reversal of the cliché: the subject becomes part of a “collective self-portrait” with multiple portrayals. In the end, like a trickster, he realizes his standing self-portrait while the model poses.” — Elena Est / Assistant Curator
