Kunstmuseum Ravensburg presents Geta Brătescu: Drawing As a Dance

Drawings are the focal point of her work. Brătescu saw sketching as a physical act, a bodily motion akin to a dance, through which she investigated the world as it appeared in her surroundings. The solo show spans a period of nearly fifty years, from 1967 to 2018, and is the first display of Brătescu’s varied output in southern Germany.

She began her whimsical, experimental painting where it did not appear possible: behind the Iron Curtain, in Communist Romania, where Social Realism was the state dogma. In contrast to painting as “official state art,” Brătescu’s artistic output is characterized by processual works, the principle of series and variety, rather than individual pictures. Despite official repression, Geta Brătescu insists from the beginning on the artist’s position as a representative of free thought and delight in playful exploration. She repeatedly offers thematic expression to the value of the artist in society and the studio as a creative area and a focus of mental energy, including the appropriation of individuals expressing resistance from international literature. Brătescu’s collages, as well as her installational and performance works in photography and cinema, are inspired by found ordinary items and her own body. Brătescu’s broadened understanding of drawing as a medium of conceptual expression is revealed in these pieces. In her later work, she substituted the drawing pen with scissors and concentrated on the free “play of shapes” in her vividly colored paper collages.

Curated by Ute Stuffer