Geta Bratescu at Galerie im Taxispalais in Austria

Galerie im Taxispalais is presenting a dual exhibition featuring Geta Bratescu from June 28 to August 24.

Geta Bratescu is regarded as one of the most remarkable personalities of Romanian post-war avant-garde art. The exhibition at Galerie im Taxispalais Innsbruck represents the first extensive international presentation of her performances, films, drawings and objects that she created in Bucharest during the mid-seventies. Bratescu’s oeuvre results from a complex act of self-examination, which aims to objectify body and things, in a movement from the subjective and real towards a state of the objective and the abstraction.

In the 1970s, Geta Bratescu developed an intermedia concept for space-specific, performative works in which she investigated the relation between physiognomy, the body and the surrounding space. Her first recorded performance entitled The Studio (1978, camera: Ion Grigorescu) functions as a self-representational story exploring and processing the artist’s mental and physical environment. For Bratescu her studio is the space to redefine the Self, the space where the artist confesses freely her pleasure in playfulness; it is a stage where ideas come alive and where the performed gestures disclose alternative scripts to the day-to-day condition.

Towards White (1975), Self-Portrait, Towards White (1975), and From Black to White (1976) can be perceived as the sequences of a theatrical play, where the acting role, assumed by the artist, brings into discussion questions of self-identity and its cancellation and of the dematerialization of the object and the body in space.

In the film Hands (1977, camera: Ion Grigorescu), subtitled "For the eye, the hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait", the actors are the artist’s hands. Through a cinematic succession of suggestive gestural movements, the hands are seen as selecting, playing with small objects and then drawing their linear profile on the table, providing an alternative mode of reconstructing the artist’s portrait / identity.

Geta Bratescu was born in Ploiesti in 1926. She lives and works in Bukarest. For more information visit www.galerieimtaxispalais.at

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