IOMO Gallery announces the opening of the exhibition “Angelina. Filmul bate viața” on November 27, at 6:00 PM. Conceived as a tribute to the work of Ion Bârlădeanu, the exhibition brings together a selection of approximately 60 collages, clippings from period magazines, made between 2010–2017. The works come from a private collection, most of which are being presented publicly for the first time in an exhibition context.
“Ion Bârlădeanu – the film director
There is a fascinating myth of the man living at the margins of the world, whose existence unfolds in a psychopomp sphere, beyond conventions or bourgeois comforts. Every society needs such people: those who inhabit both its inside and its outside. They are the creators of critical discourse, the ironists, the cynics, the libertines or the madmen who lay the philosophical foundations of Western civilization. Western philosophy abounds in such examples: Socrates, Antisthenes, Diogenes the Cynic, Montaigne, Rousseau, or Nietzsche are episodes of this kind. They are the free spirits who make corrosive discourse possible in an open society. This caustic discourse generates essential social self-regulation. The history of European free thought is, more or less, an episode within this gallery of people who either refuse to play by the canonical rules of their time, choosing a contrarian way of life, or who unceasingly question the status quo. Ion Bârlădeanu lived precisely such an existence. Born in 1946, he avoided becoming an ‘upstanding citizen’ for more than thirty years. Under communism, he drifted through all kinds of work. At twenty, he left his native village of Zăpodeni (Vaslui County) and began working in the reed fields of Tulcea or as a docker in Constanța. In Bucharest, he was by turns a gravedigger, a sawmill cutter, a guard, or an unskilled laborer at the People’s House (Casa Poporului).
After 1989, he lived on marginal resources, working as a freelancer sorting garbage in a courtyard on Moşilor Street and doing odd jobs for the residents. He neither started a family nor took on formal employment again. And yet, throughout all these years, Ion Bârlădeanu sustained an artistic project that he showed ‘only to a few clever people.’ He did what every artist should do, literally or metaphorically: he undertook the risky journey through no man’s land where every society sheds its masks. The garbage dump is one such place. Almost all the cultural information of a civilization eventually ends up in the trash. It is fertile ground for an autodidact, for any seeker. From its entrails, Ion Bârlădeanu spent more than thirty years selecting images from magazines and creating a series of unique collages.
He assembled them with the intention of making films. Starting from a native talent for drawing and driven by the desire to direct or act in movies, he created a proto-pop imaginary universe that was twenty years ahead of the Romanian public’s capacity to receive it, pop aesthetics only becoming a post-1989 reality in Romania, as a direct consequence of consumer society. With minimal means, he produces a cinematic frame that tells an entire story each time. All his collages are a very particular encounter between pop art and a surrealist-Dada undercurrent. And everything breathes a melancholic air of the communist gulag, where the world of film and the world of brands seemed the only possible sites of freedom.
In 2008, while Ion has an exhibition in Paris, he meets Angelina Jolie for a few minutes in the lobby of the hotel where she was staying. They took a photo, communicating through the universal language of gestures and smiles. From that moment on, for more than twelve years until his death, Bârlădeanu continued to cast Angelina in his films. Together with Sophia Loren, Catherine Deneuve, and Claudia Cardinale, Angelina is one of the divas of the director from Vaslui. Ion Bârlădeanu is, in his own way, perhaps the most prolific Romanian director of all time, working with the world’s biggest stars free of charge and boasting the most diverse portfolio of film genres. In this direct, personal way, he managed to balance his life through art.”
– Text by Dan Popescu
The exhibition can be visited between November 27, 2025 and January 17, 2026, at IOMO Gallery, 29 Băiculești Str, Bucharest.
