BOOK LAUNCH
"Cealaltă față a lumii / The other face of the world" Date | Friday, January 26, 2024, at 18:00 Venue | Meron Roastery, Horea 5 Street, Cluj-Napoca, RO Artists Ioana Olăhuț and Anca Bodea invite you to the launch of the bilingual book "Cealaltă față a lumii / The other face of the world", which they edited and produced with the support of the Hassium Cultural Association. The event will take place in the presence of the authors of the critical texts that supported this initiative: Adriana Oprea, curator, art critic and museographer, Liviana Dan, curator and art critic, Alexandra Chiriac, art historian. The volume presents the work of nine artists professionally trained in Cluj-Napoca at the University of Art and Design between 2002 and 2015: Ana Maria Micu, Ioana Olăhuț, Anca Bodea, Ioana Iacob, Mirela Moscu, Anca Brânzaș, Oana Năstăsache, Roxana Ajder, Andrea Tivadar. These artists are distinguished by a relevant and constant activity in the competitive field of contemporary painting, this being one of the fundamental criteria in the selection made by the editors of the book. How does one survive in the paradigm of contemporary painting? How relevant is it and how does it assert itself in the multitude of mediums of expression of current art? Is there a "women's" perspective on painting made in Cluj in the last twenty years? Together with our guests, we will celebrate the publication of this volume which presents a sample of contemporary Romanian painting and analyses these aspects of the art world. MEDIA COVERAGE Daria Ghiu, Arte Frumoase - 17 February 2024, Radio România Cultural Daniel Ioan, Cealaltă față a lumii, personal page Facebook post, 17 februarie 2024 Daria Ghiu, Arte Frumoase - 3 February 2024, Radio România Cultural Lansare de carte – “Cealaltă față a lumii”, Empower Artists, published online on 22 January 2024 Mădălina Mihai, Creaţiile unei artiste din Botoşani, prezentate într-un volum de artă, Monitorul de Botoșani, 24 January 2024 |
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Title: Cealaltă față a lumii / The other face of the world
Authors: Roxana Ajder, Anca Brânzaș, Anca Bodea, Ioana Iacob, Ana Maria Micu, Mirela Moscu, Oana Năstăsache, Ioana Olăhuț, Andrea Tivadar
Introductory dialogue: Anca Bodea with Ioana Olăhuț
Critical essays: Adriana Oprea, Alexandra Chiriac, Liviana Dan
Publisher: Hassium Cultural Association
Printing: Idea Design & Print Cluj-Napoca
Design: Eugen Coșorean
Publication year: 2023
Languages: Romanian, English
Format: 235 x 165 mm
Extent: 184 pages
Illustrations: 128 full colour
ISBN: 978-973-0-39466-5
link to purchase from idea.ro
link to purchase from carturesti.ro
Authors: Roxana Ajder, Anca Brânzaș, Anca Bodea, Ioana Iacob, Ana Maria Micu, Mirela Moscu, Oana Năstăsache, Ioana Olăhuț, Andrea Tivadar
Introductory dialogue: Anca Bodea with Ioana Olăhuț
Critical essays: Adriana Oprea, Alexandra Chiriac, Liviana Dan
Publisher: Hassium Cultural Association
Printing: Idea Design & Print Cluj-Napoca
Design: Eugen Coșorean
Publication year: 2023
Languages: Romanian, English
Format: 235 x 165 mm
Extent: 184 pages
Illustrations: 128 full colour
ISBN: 978-973-0-39466-5
link to purchase from idea.ro
link to purchase from carturesti.ro
"Ana Maria Micu seems to me at least as self-immersed in her own visuality. Her works speak of a certain obsession with her own pictoriality, lived very existentially (to the point of strangeness in the eyes of others), and of an endlessly reiterated incursion into the nervous system of circuits, membranes, connections and fine tissues of her own self-image, in the endless hypostases of ruthless self-representations in the midst of a vegetal unleashing that seems like a mental, hallucinatory jungle. You discover at some point that her vines and thickets are in fact nothing more than the affectionate and caring collection of a natural co-presence between the limits of her own apartment that also serves as a studio. From the strange flowers, fascinating and malignant at the same time, stitched over- and hyper-realistic on the skin of her own self-portraits, through which I first met her in the early 2000s, Ana Maria Micu’s painting has progressively “moved away” from the immediate self, detached herself by staging a much broader, more contextual and more tolerant perspective towards hybrids of imagery (collages, text insertions and taken pseudo-visuality, slightly dissonant cut-outs in fields of textures with deployments of impressive pictorial technicalities). Yet she has always retained, like a deeply inlaid gem, the infinitely retouched memory of her own representation, the ego always the same, projected outward through the vermiform tangle of lush (and slightly terrifying through the impression of continuous expansion) vegetation. The inexplicably equatorial, exotic air of her otherwise “domestic” universe comes from here, from a swarm of leaves, roots, pots, flows, undulations and vegetal overflows, like organic self-exfoliations in the uncrowded and clumsy, but probably soothingly neutral and beneficial to the artist’s metabolism, ambient environment of a typical Romanian apartment block."
— excerpt from "The Last Painting" by Adriana Oprea / art critic and curator
— excerpt from "The Last Painting" by Adriana Oprea / art critic and curator
"In the works of Ana Maria Micu, it is clarity and detail that are present, in an entanglement of humans, plants, and interiors that all receive the same meticulous attention. These close encounters occur on canvas and paper, and eventually become animated, creating absorbing environments that pulsate with the life of each item, no matter how humdrum or, on the contrary, how exotic."
— excerpt from "Women’s Work" by Alexandra Chiriac / art historian
— excerpt from "Women’s Work" by Alexandra Chiriac / art historian