Cornel Brudascu

Galeria Plan B is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Cornel Brudascu on the occasion of Berlin Art Week.

Developed around recent paintings and drawings from the past 15 years, the exhibition reconsiders a complex body of work spanning a period of time from the 1960s until today. Selected from an extensive oeuvre, at times marked by historical moments the artist experienced, the works exhibited – nude male bodies, portraits of friends, notebook drawings – share an autonomy for the social circumstances in which they were created and are connected by a certain intimacy.

A photo-realist painting from an acclaimed stage in Brudascu's work – based on its recent discovery and association with the global Pop Art movement after having been included in the The World Goes Pop exhibition at Tate Modern in 2015 – acts as an introduction to the exhibition. This painting from 1970 represents the portrait of Ion Munteanu – a friend from university that committed suicide. A warm, hypnotic portrait of the painter frozen in a timeless potential can define the whole generation of Brudascu, suggesting a dramatic dimension of their destiny as a generation of artists in 1970s and 80s Romania.

The male figure in the instances of the dancer and the erotic body is a recurrent theme in the exhibition. Brudascu has a profound admiration for the ballet of Sergei Diaghilev expressing the human drama and the essence of modernity. The dancer's body is presented in its full beauty, exuding eroticism. The erotic body is represented in paintings of the male figure posing for the artist in expressions that elude the academic formula of the model, and diverge in the realm of sensibility seen from the perspective of sexuality in various nuances: the animal body, or the human as animal, sleep, wakefulness, the body's physicality or the colour of the nude emphasizing its sensitivity.

The international art scene has discovered and integrated Brudascu (as it has frequently happened with artists from the so-called peripheries) in exhibitions such as the Gwangju Biennale in 2014 and The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern in 2015, where he was listed as a Pop artist for his photo-realist works from the 1970s. He has been written about as the gay artist finally acknowledging his belonging to this sexual community and was crowned local master, head of school and figure in the shadow of the success gained by the School of Cluj. Beyond these aspects, one of the goals of this exhibition is to show the art of Brudascu in its core, to reveal its energy and spirit connecting different periods and works of this artist now in his 80s.

Cornel Brudascu (b. 1937) lives and works in Cluj. Selected exhibitions include: Life – A User's Manual, ArtEncounters Biennale 2nd edition, Timisoara (2017); The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London (2015); Burning Down the House, 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014); Salonul de vara, Plan B, Cluj (2012); East of Eden - Photorealism: Versions of Reality, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest (2011); Der offene Garten, Kunsthalle Lingen, Lingen (2010); Romanian Cultural Resolution, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig (2010); The Museum of Painting, The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (2005).

Selected public collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris.