The exhibition “The Anatomy of Burden” by artist Maria Pop (Timaru), curated by Adriana Oprea and Cerasela Barbone, opens this month at Gallery 15 Design / Hanul cu Tei (63 Lipscani Street, Bucharest) The opening will take place on June 11, starting at 6:00 PM.
The series of works “Anatomy of Burden” speaks of pressure, containment and deformation, of adaptation, fragility and the domesticated body. Suspended between vulnerability and constraint, the bodies are organic forms without becoming explicitly anatomical, their status oscillating between being an organ, an amputated limb, a sandbag, a drop, a gland or a ritual object. They are psychically charged forms that sometimes transmit a state of bodily or emotional anxiety: emotional prostheses, affective burdens, and objects of survival. Instruments without function, but which emanate a latent sexuality, they are objects whose fragility is able, paradoxically, to bear weight, thus transmitting a constitutive, defining ambiguity.
The sock is an intimate, domestic, soft, almost humble object. Cement is the opposite: rigidity, construction, urban, brutalism, permanence. I place hardness in a soft skin and that gives the real tension. The sock ˗ protects, absorbs, envelops, hides, and molds itself. The cement ˗ fixes, stiffens, pulls down, immobilizes. The series “Anatomy of Burden” are inspired by a humanity that continues to function, although it is full of weight. They are soft forms forced to carry density, domestic objects transformed into tense, deformed bodies, between adaptation and pressure. My works investigate the way in which fragile matter continues to carry weight in all its meanings.
A domestic soundscape navigates the exhibition: dishes, drawers, laundry, coffee, footsteps, objects, games. Repetitive and almost invisible sounds are composing the affective and mechanical infrastructure of everyday life.
Maria Pop (Timaru) — b. 1980 — lives and works in Bucharest. She graduated from the Sculpture Department of the National University of Arts in Bucharest in 2010 and later obtained a Ph.D. in Fine and Decorative Arts from the same university.
Her practice moves between sculpture, ceramics, drawing, installation, performance, focusing not only on process and materiality but also on a particular form of expressiveness, described by Ana Blandiana as “an almost strange mixture of sensitivity and irony, tenderness and humor, bright light and masochistic disguised bitterness.”
Her works have been shown in group exhibitions in galleries and museums across Romania and abroad, as well as in solo exhibitions in Bucharest at Contemporan Space (2022), Alert Studio (2020), Sandwich (2018), Aiurart Gallery (2013), and the Brancovan Palaces in Mogoșoaia (2006). Her installations often reveal a feminist dimension, marked by sharp satire, irony, and emotional ambiguity.
In 2024, she was awarded a fellowship at the MMCA Residency Changdong, Seoul, South Korea. In 2026, she participated in an art residency at Destelheide, Belgium. Since 2014, she has been part of Colonia21, a collective of artists that meets annually during an art residency at the Tescani Cultural Center, Romania.
The exhibition can be visited by appointment until July 4.
