Bringing together a new body of work created specifically for this project, Construction Site/ Șantier offers an insight into Gorzo’s artistic universe, where the creative process becomes a continuous form of experimentation and the exhibition space is transformed into a living studio. The exhibition explores the relationship between gesture, materiality, and image, foregrounding tense, vibrant forms that exist in a constant state of transformation.
Built around the idea of the construction site as a metaphor for becoming and work in progress, the exhibition reflects the artist’s interest in the expressive potential of matter and in the dialogue between the figurative and the abstract. The works create a complex visual field in which anthropomorphic narratives coexist with multiple painterly layers, generating new depths and possibilities for interpretation.
“Șantier” is the fourth exhibition with Dumitru Gorzo at /SAC and the sixth we have worked on together over the past ten years. Although I have always felt that it is more natural for me to curate group exhibitions than solo shows, I feel comfortable doing so for an artist whose practice I have been so closely involved with. This long-standing collaboration has also afforded me a privileged vantage point from which to observe how, for Gorzo, the concept of “șantier / construction site” can become a metaphor for a creative process in a state of perpetual experimentation, and of how Gorzo often transforms the exhibition space (with the rigor/structure and force/disruption of a real construction site) into a living studio, as in the “Continuous Studio” series.
Defining for Dumitru Gorzo today is both the (re-)drawing or updated reworking of intangible yet vibrant, contorted forms – full of visceral/embodied tensions and energies – as in a “de-abstracted abstract expressionism” (Justin Baroncea) – as well as the performative action within the creative process and the artist’s active and continuous curiosity/wonder regarding materiality, which becomes a co-subject – are important to the significance of his art. “Șantier” presents new works, created specifically for this exhibition, featuring a technical innovation stemming directly from the artist’s preoccupation with materiality as a subject. The perception of the works balances like a dance between the narrative of anthropomorphic (re-)figurations and the expressive and narrative potential of the interplay of multiple pictorial planes co-present on the same surface, creating new depths.
A new moment of intensity in Gorzo’s ongoing relationship with his work/creation, the exhibition “Șantier” at /SAC @ Malmaison takes shape as a captivating/primed, ephemeral, collaborative station/construction, centered around a laboratory phase (of “gorzolănii”). – Alex Radu
The exhibition, curated by Alex Radu, with a graphic/exhibition design by Ioana Naniș, Cristi Matei & Justin Baroncea, can be visited until August 1, 2026.
