Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Souvenirs from Earth at Calina Gallery




























Souvenirs from Earth

curated by Liviana Dan

Calina Gallery, Timisoara 
1 October - 15 November 2015

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Works in the exhibition

Circles in space
2015
metal

Clouds
2015
photo on ceramic tile on canvas

Untitled (Saturn plant stand)
2015
metal, indoor plant

After the observatory (comet and Saturn)
2015
metal

Nebula
2015
metal, neon, indoor plants

Up and down (display unit)
2015
mixed media

Works on display

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower seeds / hand painted porcelain, 2010
Alexandru Tipoia, Man carrying pots, 1963
Polar bear / porcelain, 1970s (part of the installation Recovery, 2010 - 2015, Vlad Nanca)
Ice skater, porcelain, 1920s
John Nilsen Laurvik, Is It Art? / publication, 1913 (Razvan Banescu collection)
Radu Comsa, Untitiled / photo on ceramic, 2006

The comet
2015
neon

Untitled (Comet plant stand)
2015
metal, indoor plant

Crystal Palace
2014
wall lights, dimensions variable




From White Square to White Cube at Alert Studio




















Vlad Nanca

From White Square to White Cube
Art history according to…
The miseducation of…

Alert Studio
16 - 30 April 2015


[…] Marcel Duchamp [...] Kasimir Malevich [...] Paul Klee [...] Piet Mondriaan [...] Ad Reinhardt [...] Andy Warhol [...] Carl Andre [...] Sol LeWitt [...] Donald Judd [...] Robert Morris [...] Ellsworth Kelly [...] Richard Serra [...] Superstudio [...] Enzo Mari [...] Hans Haake [...] Hans Hollein [...] Jean-Pierre Raynaud [...] Daniel Spoerri [...] Teodor Graur [...] Vlad Nanca.

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When cholera was mapped in Victorian Britain, they soon realized that the areas with no sewage and lack of hygiene in the bathrooms and kitchens were the most affected ones. Measures were taken to fix this and from there on the ceramic tiles tend to lose their decorative purposes and gain practical ones by becoming standard in every household's kitchen. In the 20th century, with the great help of Le Corbusier and functionalism, all of our kitchens have been equipped with grids of white tiles, looking more and more like hospital operating rooms than anything else. Nowhere has this been more visible than in the kitchens of Socialist apartment blocks of Romania in the 70s, where the 15x15 cm white tiles were omnipresent. In the same decade, a few thousand kilometers more to the west, in Italy, the radical architecture group Superstudio were proposing (a not so different) socialist utopia, with their flat, egalitarian Continuous Monument.

Borne along by a fashionable Marxist undercurrent, Superstudio developed an extreme aesthetic that looked like modernism run wild and yet purported to offer an egalitarian utopia freed from the cycle of consumption. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, developed in a series of collages and storyboards in 1969, is a vision of total urbanisation. There is nature and then there is the city, a single giant structure stretching across the landscape. The city’s form is determined by a geometric accumulation of white cubes — and if cities can be achieved simply by multiplying these basic components then there is no need any more for architects.” Justin McGuirk, icon 001 (April 2003)

Nanca’s works in the exhibition are fragments of the grid proposed by the Continuous Monument as well as fragments of memories of the endless hours spent surrounded by the white tiles in the kitchen of his family’s apartment during his childhood and last but not leasts fragments of the 20th century art history grid as described by Rosalind Krauss:

Logically speaking, the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity. Any boundaries imposed upon it by a given painting or sculpture can only be seen according to this logic-as arbitrary. By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Rosalind Krauss,  October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979)

Vlad Nanca thus proceeds to telling a subjective tale of art history in a personal universe of white tiles (with gentle add-ons), citing during the process for this experiment, the names of architecture and  art history  more or lesser known personalities that he identifies as essential in his endeavor.

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Works in the exhibition

White on white
2015
ceramic tiles on canvas
75x60 cm

Plant Stand I, Plant Stand II
2015
panel, ceramic tiles, ceramic pots, indoor plants

White Cube
2015
ceramic tiles on plywood, silicone
162 x 162 x 162 mm
Fruit Stickers
2015
watercolor on paper
15 x 15 cm each


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Exhibition curated by: Catalin Burcea

Thanks to: Alexandru Ciubotariu, Radu Comsa, Fabrik, Nona Inescu