For the first time in recent decades, young graduates and students from the four most important national artistic centers – Iași, Bucharest, Timișoara and Cluj-Napoca – are exhibiting together at the Museum of Recent Art.
Cei noi / Graduate Curated exhibition, curated by Antonia Iordache and Erwin Kessler, is dedicated to final-year students and graduates of the last three years (2021-2023) from all majors: painting, graphics, sculpture, ceramics, mural art, photography, video, fashion, and industrial design.
66 works made by 41 young artists invaded the MARe/Museum of Recent Art spaces on four floors, from -1 and the ground floor to floors 1 and 2. Initially dedicated to the Permanent Collection and established artists, the large galleries on floors 1 and 2 became, for three months, a veritable map of the latest directions, trends and personalities of Romanian art.
The selected artists are: Bandi Daniel David, Adrian Buda, Andreea-Delia Buzilă-Tunza, Dan Cebotari, Oana Cervinschi, Ioana Cojocea, Diana Matilda Crișan, Ioana Colac, Alexandra Cojocaru, Adrian Cojocaru, Maria Carla David, Matei Emanuel, Anca Enache, Luca Florian, Andreea Grigoraș, Dimitrie Luca Gora, Georgiana Liana Herea, Mariana Hultoană, Ana Lupu, Ana Messer, Ioana Mincu, Ciprian Mitrică, Irina Motroc, Cristina Andreea Ostafi, Andrei Octavian Panfiloiu, Andreea Eliza Petrov, Adrian Piorescu, Roxana Alexandra Pîrvu, Mimi Pleșoianu, Andra Victoria Popescu, Norica Ioana Popescu, Adriana Preda, Elena Preda, Iulia-Dana Pușcașu, Ionut Răzvan, Bianca Serenciuc, Oana Gabriela Sima, Nadina Stoica, Ada Stefan, Cristian Florin Todor, Cătălina Ungureanu, Cătălin Velea.
Cei noi / Graduate Curated is also a first for MARe/Muzeul de Artă Recentă, which has systematically exhibited dozens and dozens of established names of post-war Romanian art in the first five years since its establishment. The previous thematic exhibitions on topics significant for visual culture and national history (from the image of the feminine ideal to the representation of sports, the city or agriculture in Romanian art) never considered the generational criterion. This time, although the age limit did not appear among the selection criteria, a collective portrait of the current artist in his youth was automatically drawn from the more than 300 files submitted.
Cei Noi / Graduate Curated presents the set of practices, styles, ideas, techniques, subjects and visual formulas that individualise the current generation of artists and shows how artistic mediums and techniques are transgressed, especially through installations (frequent among the proposals received). In these formulas hybrids, interdisciplinary practices meet and collaborate.
The exhibition works like a microscope, penetrating the twisted fibres of works that are incredibly soft in technique and, at the same time, extremely hard in the subject matter.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalog (Romanian/English) which will include the texts of the curators of the exhibition and two critical texts about the exhibition signed by the Art History graduates: Laura-Gabriela Carpov-Hrițac and Alexandra Moț, Cei noi / Graduate Curated having also a segment dedicated to the penetrating and disarming way in which young art critics relate to the creation of their peers.
