The Monster, the Square, and the Burst of Laughter

From Ion Țuculescu to Megan Dominescu, “The Monster, the Square, and the Burst of Laughter” is the exhibition that reconfigures the museum’s collection more than 5 years after its opening.

MARe/Museum of Recent Art Bucharest

The Monster, the Square, and the Burst of Laughter is the exhibition that reconfigures the museum’s collection more than 5 years after its opening. It presents a new vision of recent art, from Ion Țuculescu to Megan Dominescu, through an interpretive framework that brackets the classic historical découpage.

The main thesis of this curatorial essay states that there are two major areas of stylistic practice in contemporary Romanian art: an interest in archaic plastic formulas and the use of humor.

The archaic is defined as an artistic way of staging the sacred, of making it visible. The etymology of the word points to this connotation of an old, essential reality. The archeus is the ancient principle, generative of everything that happens. In artists’ studio practice, there is a continuous interest in representing what does not belong to this familiar world, what is indefinable — the other world, the true world. The exhibition shows how this interest in the archaic is stylistically organized, identifying two major lines of approach: the monstrous and the geometric.

The second major paradigm presented in the exhibition is a constant preference for humor in Romanian visual art. It has old roots in the interwar period, but also in the generation after Țuculescu. However, it became bolder and more assumed after 1989. Humor is a survival strategy for people in this geographic area, a spiritual valve to make life under difficult times bearable.

Visitors are recommended to begin the exhibition in the museum’s basement, in order to enter the synesthetic installation of Victoria Zidaru, entitled The Victory of the Day. On the first floor, the archaic with its two valences — monstrous and geometric — presents itself as two branches of the same strategy. On the second floor, the mixture of archaic-grotesque and geometric transforms and melts into laughter, sarcasm, and a grim burst of laughter that continues up to the third floor, where the exhibition concludes with a film projection in a mini-amphitheater.

Curator: Dan Popescu