Ciprian Muresan
14 Nov 2014 - 14 Feb 2015
CIPRIAN MURESAN
14 November 2014 – 14 February 2015
Plan B is pleased to announce the opening of Ciprian Muresan’s third solo exhibition in the Berlin gallery space. The show will be followed in Plan B's Cluj gallery, by the group exhibition: 'Domino Dancing', curated by Ciprian Muresan, which will open on the 28th of November.
Muresan’s Berlin show features new works that incorporate the various directions of his particular interests. These encompass his involvement of the public interacting physically with his practice; the uncomfortable theme of suicide and - a constant motif in Ciprian Muresan’s work – the subject and act of art reproduction.
Bucharest city model (fragment), 1 to 330 in scale, is a cardboard architectural model. Its placement at the entrance of the exhibition space forces visitors to step on it in order to access the other exhibited works. The level of destruction of the model is left up to the public, who are forced to choose their position of either brutally damaging, or gently passing over this “obstacle”. The decision to select Bucharest as a model does not only relate to the burden of demolition that affected the city in communist times, but also to its present reality, which is marked by urban chaos, recent random urban development, the destruction of architectural heritage, and a tendency of its inhabitants to create their own paths and micro-structures in their everyday life throughout the city.
The Suicide Series comprises a number of drawings executed in coloured pencil, based on reproductions of works by artists who committed suicide. In the artist’s words, the study relates to: “The danger of delving too deeply into other people’s biographies, the tendency to want to speculate on the motives of this final act, or the feeling of a certain kind of admiration for the courage or recklessness of the action; perhaps equivalent to a fascination for the morbid. [...] Here, the suicide theme is not related to their work, as is the case with Emil Cioran’s texts or the legend of Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s death (who was said to have died during an artistic action), but a tension is being created, in which you can be wrongly tempted to read the works from the perspective of suicide as opposed to considering their formal and aesthetic concerns. As the initial idea to borrow original works by the cited artists can prove rather difficult these days, I chose instead to continue my endeavours via art reproduction. The method that inspired me is the colour printing technique that splits images into four colour channels – CMYK. In order to copy the works as accurately as possible, I reproduced the printing process and drew each colour channel successively, in pencil.”
The project, together with the model of Bucharest, was presented for the first time at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig Gallery in July 2014, following Ciprian Muresan’s work as a guest professor at the university. It evinces his view that by introducing this uncomfortable subject in an educational context, it could become an important theme of reflection for both those involved in the system in a position of power, and also for the students.
Mihnea Mircan wrote on the drawing practice of Muresan: “Never employed as an instrument of direct notation, drawing functions for Muresan in equations that enfold this mode of production in a reflection on visibility and loss, on historical suspension and ways in which the past is retrieved or confabulated. [...] and recent projects where, for instance, all reproductions in books on Antonello da Messina or Kasimir Malevich are copied on a single sheet of paper, in a spectral palimpsest that equates both the experience of rifling through the book and the distance separating historical moments.” The exhibition also includes two drawings realised in the same method, one based on a book about German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and the other a drawing he created from memory (of a previous drawing), which contains all images from a book about Piero della Francesca.
Ciprian Muresan, born 1977, lives and works in Cluj. Previous solo exhibitions include: Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2013), Plan B Berlin (2013), Tate Modern, London (2012, with Anna Molska), Centre d'art contemporaine Geneva (2012), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2011), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2010). Previous group exhibitions include: Six Lines of Flight, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) San Francisco (2012), Image to be projected until it vanishes, MUSEION Bolzano (2011), Promises From the Past, Centre Pompidou Paris (2010), Sydney Biennial (2010), The Seductiveness of the Interval, the Romanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), The Renaissance Society Chicago (2010), The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum New York (2009).
14 November 2014 – 14 February 2015
Plan B is pleased to announce the opening of Ciprian Muresan’s third solo exhibition in the Berlin gallery space. The show will be followed in Plan B's Cluj gallery, by the group exhibition: 'Domino Dancing', curated by Ciprian Muresan, which will open on the 28th of November.
Muresan’s Berlin show features new works that incorporate the various directions of his particular interests. These encompass his involvement of the public interacting physically with his practice; the uncomfortable theme of suicide and - a constant motif in Ciprian Muresan’s work – the subject and act of art reproduction.
Bucharest city model (fragment), 1 to 330 in scale, is a cardboard architectural model. Its placement at the entrance of the exhibition space forces visitors to step on it in order to access the other exhibited works. The level of destruction of the model is left up to the public, who are forced to choose their position of either brutally damaging, or gently passing over this “obstacle”. The decision to select Bucharest as a model does not only relate to the burden of demolition that affected the city in communist times, but also to its present reality, which is marked by urban chaos, recent random urban development, the destruction of architectural heritage, and a tendency of its inhabitants to create their own paths and micro-structures in their everyday life throughout the city.
The Suicide Series comprises a number of drawings executed in coloured pencil, based on reproductions of works by artists who committed suicide. In the artist’s words, the study relates to: “The danger of delving too deeply into other people’s biographies, the tendency to want to speculate on the motives of this final act, or the feeling of a certain kind of admiration for the courage or recklessness of the action; perhaps equivalent to a fascination for the morbid. [...] Here, the suicide theme is not related to their work, as is the case with Emil Cioran’s texts or the legend of Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s death (who was said to have died during an artistic action), but a tension is being created, in which you can be wrongly tempted to read the works from the perspective of suicide as opposed to considering their formal and aesthetic concerns. As the initial idea to borrow original works by the cited artists can prove rather difficult these days, I chose instead to continue my endeavours via art reproduction. The method that inspired me is the colour printing technique that splits images into four colour channels – CMYK. In order to copy the works as accurately as possible, I reproduced the printing process and drew each colour channel successively, in pencil.”
The project, together with the model of Bucharest, was presented for the first time at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig Gallery in July 2014, following Ciprian Muresan’s work as a guest professor at the university. It evinces his view that by introducing this uncomfortable subject in an educational context, it could become an important theme of reflection for both those involved in the system in a position of power, and also for the students.
Mihnea Mircan wrote on the drawing practice of Muresan: “Never employed as an instrument of direct notation, drawing functions for Muresan in equations that enfold this mode of production in a reflection on visibility and loss, on historical suspension and ways in which the past is retrieved or confabulated. [...] and recent projects where, for instance, all reproductions in books on Antonello da Messina or Kasimir Malevich are copied on a single sheet of paper, in a spectral palimpsest that equates both the experience of rifling through the book and the distance separating historical moments.” The exhibition also includes two drawings realised in the same method, one based on a book about German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and the other a drawing he created from memory (of a previous drawing), which contains all images from a book about Piero della Francesca.
Ciprian Muresan, born 1977, lives and works in Cluj. Previous solo exhibitions include: Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2013), Plan B Berlin (2013), Tate Modern, London (2012, with Anna Molska), Centre d'art contemporaine Geneva (2012), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2011), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2010). Previous group exhibitions include: Six Lines of Flight, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) San Francisco (2012), Image to be projected until it vanishes, MUSEION Bolzano (2011), Promises From the Past, Centre Pompidou Paris (2010), Sydney Biennial (2010), The Seductiveness of the Interval, the Romanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), The Renaissance Society Chicago (2010), The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum New York (2009).