IOMO Gallery presents 1/50, an exhibition bringing together fifty recent drawings by Mircea Roman and also marking the launch of the catalogue accompanying his solo exhibition Lupta schimbă gustul cărnii, presented at the gallery in autumn 2025.
Published by IOMO Gallery in a bilingual Romanian–English edition, the volume documents the seven sculptures presented in the exhibition, including Jacob’s Struggle with the Angel, the conceptual and spatial core around which the exhibition was constructed. Critical and biographical texts situate these works within the broader trajectory of Roman’s artistic practice.
Each of the fifty copies in the limited edition is accompanied by an original drawing, created by the artist as a unique work and exclusively associated with that particular copy. The editions, together with their accompanying drawings, are available for purchase, while the exhibition offers the only opportunity to see all fifty drawings gathered together, before each drawing is paired with the copy to which it has been assigned.
For nearly four decades, Mircea Roman’s work has remained rooted in the human figure, constructed through fragmentation and reassembly, closer to assemblage than to carving from a solid block. His works maintain a constant tension between fragility and monumentality: figures that appear almost pneumatic, formed as outer membranes of the sculptural volume and detached from the notion of a rigid core; impenetrable faces; and a sustained attention to the neck and ankles as transitional zones between the human and the fabricated.
Roman’s 2025 exhibition at IOMO Gallery presented his most recent works, extending this motif beyond the body to the fallen trunk, suspended on the wall like a trophy. The fifty new drawings return to the same visual repertoire: the human shell, the pyramid, the boat-man, Jacob. These are figures that the artist has been developing since the late 1980s.
Mircea Roman established himself on the international art scene after winning the Grand Prize at the Osaka Triennale of Sculpture in 1992, with the awarded work entering the collection of the Osaka Prefectural Government. Three years later, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale, following a residency at Delfina Studio that led him to settle in London for more than a decade. He returned to the Osaka Triennale in 2001 and 2003 and exhibited at the Cerveira Biennial in Portugal. In 2026, IOMO Gallery presented his work at CAN Art Fair Ibiza. His works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, the Osaka City Museum of Contemporary Art and Culture, as well as in international private collections.
