A Room of One's Own

Oana Coșug, Larisa Crunțeanu, Megan Dominescu, Adelina Ivan, Aurora Király, Olivia Mihălțianu, Doina Simionescu, Matei Bejenaru,Iulian Bisericaru, Belu-Simion Făinaru

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Anca Poterasu Gallery is happy to announce the opening of A Room of One's Own, a group show that will take place in New York, in the beautiful domestic space of a brownstone in Harlem.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s famous essay on the need for space within a male-dominated industry, the exhibition candidly acknowledges the obstacles encountered by women artists, which are too often separated from contemporary discourse on financial security, time and individual freedom.

The exhibition will present works such as Aurora Király’s Melancholia series (1997 – 2000), a memory collection inspired by cinema and the early years of photography that show the artist in her studio and in the places she traveled at the end of the 1990s. In the heart of the house-turned- exhibition space, Adelina Ivan will be displaying a series of textile visual poems, turning her practice into a story that can be read as an ongoing Borgesian Book of Sand. Also working with textile art, Larisa Crunteanu’s piece from the installation "A Room Full of Hysterical Women" (2019) addresses emotions expressed by women which have historically been disregarded and treated as somatic illnesses. Within the exhibition, the mental space becomes intertwined with the physical one.

In his most recent painting created especially for the show, And He Built a Crooked House (2020), Bisericaru brings an outsider’s view to the house in Harlem, a space he has never visited.

Architectural details of the house merge with the towering presence of the mountains surrounding his hometown, a popular summer destination in Romania, channeling the atmosphere of Hopper’s paintings and Albers’ chromatic intersections to create a vision of Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own.”

The transitive spaces of creation as seen by artists whose lives are bound continuously outward. For the artists’ work to be seen, their own rooms are always in an outsider space, where the artists become unknown guests. The domestic allure of the Harlem brownstone reveals an inner world to its visitors, transforming into a laboratory wherein parallel spaces of folding and unfolding realities emerge.

"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."