Geta Brătescu

Art is a Serious Game! Geta Brătescu (1926–2018) is regarded as the grande dame of Romanian conceptual art and became known to a wider public through the 55th Biennale in Venice in 2013. This comprehensive catalogue was published on the occasion of the survey exhibition mounted by the Hamburger Kunsthalle for her 90th birthday and brings together important key works and series of works from more than six decades. It was the artist’s first retrospective museum exhibition outside her home country. Memory and history, processes of historical sedimentation and organic growth, conformity and deviation, self-questioning and self-assertion had been themes that Geta Brătescu reworked and interrogated anew again and again in the course of her long artistic career. The oeuvre of the artist, who lived in Bucharest, is extraordinarily diverse and cannot be assigned to any single stylistic direction. Geta Brătescu worked both abstractly and figuratively, on a small scale as well as expansively, and she made use of various media such as drawing, photography, film, textile work, and sculpture. She understood herself above all as a draughtswoman in the service of the line and described her colourful paper collages as “drawing with scissors,” her textile works as “drawing with the sewing machine.” At the same time, in new abstract series of works, the “Cut Outs” (paper cuts), the artist’s interest was directed at the relation between line and plane, a relationship she declined through seemingly endless sequences and modulations. Fascinated by literature and philosophy, she devoted herself knowledgeably to the great figures of world literature such as Medea, Dido or Faust. For many decades Geta Brătescu was also responsible for the graphic design of the magazine “Secolul 20” (today “Secolul 21”), Romania’s most important cultural and intellectual publication, to which she remained loyal all these years.

Exhibition:
Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 30/4 – 7/8/2016