Opening: 16.10.2015, 7 pm
 
The exhibition is structured on two different chapters connected through the practice of drawing. For Geta Brătescu drawing is a language complementary to writing, a mental activity at the bottom of every formal or spatial embodiment of her various artistic paths: collage, etching, tapestry, object, photography, experimental film, video or performance. Moreover, the title of the exhibition is based on the subtitle of the 1979 photographic collage The Studio, endorsing the strong bond between drawing, its space of creation – the studio – and its adjacent artistic process.
 
Geta Brătescu uses drawing in an “expanded field”, with experiments, exercises and results that each time access a new, still unexplored area, through academic drawing, by model, through automatic drawing, “with the eyes closed”, through “drawing with scissors”, in collage, or in serial, geometric drawing. The line is the generative and constitutive element of this language, the fold, the intersection of the abstract and the real planes:
 
Everything the painter or the sculptor accomplishes in the concreteness of matter, the plastic image, I am called upon to achieve through the adventures of the line; solely the line creating space and expression, not the line of the scholastic drawing, but the line that writes, driven by a I-don’t-know-what-kind of mental, imaginative energy. Therefore these drawings, without any historical or biographical (autobiographical) connotations, naturally place themselves inside the mythological universe of all times. (Geta Brătescu)
 
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Thereby, the gallery’s first floor presents The Power of the Line area, with recent drawings and collages (2009-2015), specific to the geometric play of lines,  achieved through an abstract dialogue between the straight, angular line and the curve one. These works are shown for the first time, some of them having been created especially on this occasion. In their proximity we present Geta Brătescu’s most recent artist film, The Line, worked with Ștefan Sava.
 
The ground floor of the gallery brings together works from the 1990s, similar to the drawings “with the eyes closed”: the Ghosts series of drawings, the Mume triptych, with the homonymous 2004 installation. The Mume are representations of the primordial feminine principle (also present in Geta Brătescu’s oeuvre in the shape of Medea or Didona), dual, at the origin of all there is, giving life as well as death. They can be deciphered through the Jungian perspective on the self, on the anima and the archetypical mother, Geta Brătescu perceiving creativity as a feminine feature that blossoms from the unconscious – the realm of the Mume.
 
Geta Brătescu (1926, Ploiesti, Romania) lives and works in Bucharest. Her recent exhibitions include the 2015 Tate Liverpool solo show, MATRIX 254 / Geta Bratescu 2014 solo show at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, USA, lI Palazzo Enciclopedico, La Biennale di Venezia 2013, La Triennale Paris2012, Palais de Tokyo, the 12th Istanbul Biennale 2011, etc. In 2016 Hamburger Kunsthalle will show an extensive Geta Brătescu retrospective exhibition. Geta Brătescu’s works are in important collections, such as: The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; MoMA, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; MUMOK, Vienna, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana and FRAC Lorraine.

 
Linia, 2014, HD video, 14’50”, image, sound, editing: Ștefan Sava
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