Geta Brătescu

Art is a serious game

Geta Brătescu is considered the grande dame of Romanian conceptual art. She became known to a wide audience through the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013; the art magazine BLAU honoured her in detail in its December/January 2015/16 issue. The comprehensive catalogue is now being published on the occasion of the exhibition organised by the Hamburger Kunsthalle to celebrate her 90th birthday, which brings together important key works and series of works from over six decades. It is the first retrospective museum exhibition of the artist's work outside her home country. Memory and history, historical deposition and organic growth processes, conformity and deviation, self-questioning and self-assertion are themes that Geta Brătescu has repeatedly reworked and scrutinised over the course of her long artistic career. The work of the Bucharest-based artist is extraordinarily diverse and cannot be categorised into a single style. Geta Brătescu works both abstractly and representationally, in both small-scale and expansive ways, and she uses a variety of media such as drawing, photography, film, fabric work and sculpture. She sees herself primarily as a draughtswoman in the service of the line and describes her colourful paper collages as "drawing with scissors" and her fabric works as "drawing with a sewing machine". At the same time, in her new abstract series of works, the "Cut Outs", the artist focuses on the relationship between line and surface, exploring this relationship in seemingly infinite sequences and modulations. Fascinated by literature and philosophy, she devotes herself knowledgeably to the great figures of world literature such as Medea, Dido and Faust. For many decades, Geta Brătescu was also responsible for the graphic design of the magazine Secolul 20 (now Secolul 21), Romania's most important cultural and intellectual publication, to which she remains loyal to this day.

Exhibition:
Gallery of the Present, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 30/4 - 7/8/2016