Within this extensive program, the Art Encounters Foundation comes with a focus on 3 female artists selected for the “Symmetrical, never identical” exhibition, each of them outstanding in their field of artistic practice and a true model in all respects.
The exhibition “Symmetrical, never identical” is part of the Art Encounters Foundation’s curatorial and strategic initiative to foster connections between different generations of artists, whose works can thus be contextualized conceptually, not only chronologically.
Ioana Bătrânu (b. 1960) is known for a valiant, prolific, and significant work, publicly present since the mid-1980s, in a tough period, which left its mark on the artist’s destiny. Ioana Bătrânu’s painting absorbs everyday reality, the marginality of existence, and the contradictions of our spaces, marked by imposed and self-imposed social norms. The tension of her paintings is enhanced by the expression of her brushwork and chosen chromatics, and the recurrence of themes (Melancholic Interiors, Virgins, Closed Gardens, Dolls, and others) establishes a personal style of exceptional value and vitality. The spatial typologies the artist chooses to work with are reminiscent of those “species of spaces” that Georges Perec saw as extensions of memory: “space as inventory, space as invention.”
Adela Giurgiu (b.1990) returns almost obsessively to several themes that occupy her pictorial workspace and which, viewed together, seem to outline a universe marked by alienation, duality, isolation, and dreaming, all amplified by the tensions of spaces in which they reside. The shadow motif can suggest both the Jungian archetype and a metaphor of time as if inspired by Haruki Murakami’s writings about timeless worlds and subterranean levels, where the shadow clips out on the boundary between reality and fiction. Adela Giurgiu’s recent paintings (the cycles You and Your Shadow, Lost but Found, Apparition, and others) contribute to a dialogue with Ioana Bătrânu’s favorite themes, nurturing the same lonely and heavy atmosphere, in which only the imagination can cut small slits of light.
Agnès Varda (1928–2019) was a Franco-Belgian director and a prominent representative of the New Wave in French cinema, alongside names such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, or Jacques Demy (her husband). Consisting mainly of short films and documentaries, the artist’s body of work reflected her own personality: original, eccentric, and poetic. During her 65-year-long career, Varda made about fifty films, belonging to various styles and genres. She was also the first woman to receive an honorary Palme d’Or and Oscar for her entire achievement. As a matter of fact, the title of our current exhibition, “Symmetrical, never identical,” is inspired by a quote found by the exhibition’s curator, Diana Marincu, in one of the late director’s short films: Les Dites Cariatides (13 min.).