MIRCEA NICOLAE. SMALL THINGS, PRECIOUS THINGS
17.02.2023 - 23.04.2023

Timișoara Garrison


Piața Libertății 5, Timișoara


Opening: Friday, February 17, 15.00-17.00

Guided tour: Sunday, February 19, 10.30 – 11.00

Visiting hours during the opening weekend: 11.00 – 20.00

Curators: Salonul de proiecte | Alexandra Croitoru, Magda Radu, Ștefan Sava

Design and architecture: Larisa Sitar, Andrei Cebotaru

Ionuț Cioană (1980-2020) worked as an artist under the name Mircea Nicolae. He had a rich and varied career, imagined curatorial formats that tested institutional limits, and was one of the most talented art critics of his generation. The aim of this exhibition is to draw public attention once more to this leading figure of Romanian contemporary art via a curatorial approach designed at recuperating his artistic practice in an extensive way, placing the emphasis on his interest in exploring the urban space and the role it plays in shaping individual subjectivities. The title of the exhibition comes from an artist’s statement in which he drew a distinction between two methods of artistic production: on the one hand, there is the ‘professional’ approach to artistic activity, with an emphasis on sophisticated, rigorously thought-out and executed productions intended for established institutional spaces; on the other hand, there are ‘clumsy but sincere works, regardless of how old-fashioned or naive they might seem’, whose spontaneous and natural realization gave him pleasure and helped him to return to himself. Whereas Romanian Kiosk Company falls within the first category and was an important step toward international professional recognition for Mircea Nicolae, the other works presented in this exhibition wager on fragility, improvisation, and ephemerality: the 100 series, An Altar for Each Day, and the Prosthetics cycle. Both directions are imbued with the same emotional intensity, with the same sincerity and courage to expose oneself to the world, no matter how opaque and indifferent that world might be.

The exhibition is constructed as an itinerary that takes in distinct temporalities, which are inscribed in the conceptual thread of the works themselves: whereas the series of kiosks that makes up Romanian Kiosk Company takes us over the course of a few decades that brought deep changes, from late socialism to the capitalism of the 2000s, the poetic fragility of Altars encapsulates the cyclicity of a week, and the 100 series proposes a phenomenological foray into time and space that sums up a few years in the life of the artist.

Ionuț Cioană studied Literature at University of Bucharest (1998-2002) and completed an M.A. in the Anthropology of the Sacred Space at the ‘Ion Mincu’ Institute of Architecture and Urbanism (2002-2004). For his Ph.D. at the Bucharest National University of Arts, he was preparing a thesis on artistic work and freedom in the context of the Romanian arts scene between 1944 and 2010. In his artistic practice from 2006 to 2009, Mircea Nicolae developed a broad range of interventions in public and abandoned spaces. By means of anonymous gestures, these interventions aimed to examine the socio-political structure of the city of Bucharest, as well as the more private space of personal affective history. From 2010 to 2020, he produced a series of works showed in various contexts and venues, including Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest (2019); tranzit.ro/ bucurești (2018); Ivan Gallery, Bucharest (2017); Electroputere Gallery, Craiova (2015); Vienna Biennale (2015); Spațiul Platforma, Bucharest (2015); MUSAC, Leon (2012); Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv (2011); 32 Edgewood Avenue Gallery, New Haven (2011). His work as a curator included the exhibition Mattis Teutsch. Avant-Garde and Constructive Realism, at the Rezidența BRD Scena9, Bucharest, in collaboration with Szilárd Miklós (2019), and as an art critic he regularly published texts on the Scena9 editorial platform from 2016 to 2020.



Regular visiting hours:

Wednesday – Saturday / 13.00 – 20.00

Sunday / 11:00 – 18:00

Special thanks to Carmen Constantinescu

Co-organizers: Salonul de proiecte Association, Timișoara Center for Projects

Funded by: The City of Timișoara through the Center for Projects

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