On Thursday, August 10, the personal exhibition of the artist Ștefan Ungureanu, “Theory of Recapitulation,” presented by The H Gallery in collaboration with the H’art Gallery, will close with a finissage event.
Ștefan Ungureanu, one of the most representative visual artists of his generation, is at his 12th personal exhibition, an opportunity to explore an artistic form that he only groped in the past: the vanitas-type works, known as memento mori.
“The title of the exhibition refers to a theory with roots in the ancient world, reformulated by Ernest Haeckel at the end of the 19th century as the “law of biogenesis,” according to which ontogeny repeats phylogeny: that is, the development of the embryo of a living being resumed the phases of the evolutionary development of its species.
Unfortunately, the interpretation given by the author of the theory led to severe slippages, including its use in the logic of the Nazi ideology. Although scientifically invalidated from the very moment of its formulation, echoes of this theory persist in the social sciences or philosophy. Its attraction is that it offers a perfect resolution of the universe, a harmonious explanation that also recalls the cyclicality of life in the ancient Greeks. This is also the engine of the recapitulation that the artist does here, which starts with his childhood and ends with his son’s, in a perfect loop.
The artist resumes sequences from his childhood to anticipate those his child will experience: we are visiting the museums (real or imaginary) that marked the artist when he was young. Both museums and the world have changed in the meantime, and this magical visit does not open the doors of a natural history museum but rather a technological one.
Man and his existence are shown to us in dioramas through familiar objects, some ancient, others that send us into the future, as in a series of contemporary vanitas.
Is recapitulation possible, or are these messages in bottles found from the past rather projections of a future invented decades ago in science fiction, but which nowadays is getting closer and closer to reality?” (fragment from the curatorial text)
Ștefan UNGUREANU (b. 1984) is a Bucharest National University of Arts graduate.
He had personal exhibitions in Düsseldorf (Atelier Am Eck), Cluj-Napoca (Invitro), Brașov (Multicultural Center of Transilvania University), Mogoșoaia (Cultural Center Palatele Brâncovești de la Portile București – Mogoșoaia Palace, CUHNIE gallery) and Bucharest (H’ Art Gallery, the National Museum of Old Maps and Books, ARCUB, Cărturești Carusel). He participated in group exhibitions in Berlin, Moscow (Triumph Gallery), New York (Slag Gallery), Prague (Pragovka Gallery), and Timisoara (Jecza Gallery).
His works can be found in collections from Romania and abroad, in the permanent exhibition at MARe (Museum of Recent Art) and the MNAC (National Museum of Contemporary Art) collection. He lives and works in Bucharest.
The exhibition can be visited Tuesday-Saturday, between 14:00 and 19:00, until August 10.
