Kunstmuseum Ravensburg presents Geta Brătescu: Drawing As a Dance from March 25 to June 25, 2023.
Opening: March 24, 7pm
Geta Brătescu (1926-2018), a Romanian artist, is now regarded as one of Eastern Europe’s most brilliant avant-gardists. Throughout her life, she experimented with a wide range of mediums to study the narrative potential of abstract shapes through serial variations.
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.
You May Also Like
Curated by Ute Stuffer
A catalogue is being prepared in collaboration with the Verlag für moderne Kunst; along with essays by Sven Spieker and Diana Ursan, it provides access for the first time in the German language to a selection of Brătescu’s own texts, her reflections about art and the world.
Displayed in parallel on the second floor until June 25, 2023 is the collection presentation in the area of classic modernism entitled “FROM FACE TO FACE. TWO SOUTHERN GERMAN COLLECTIONS IN DIALOGUE” and developed on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg.
Accompanying program
April 27, 6pm
Joint exhibition tour with Lorenz Wiederkehr, research assistant at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
June 1, 6pm
Joint exhibition tour with Roland Wäspe, art historian, exhibition organizer, former director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (from 1989 to 2022)
Kunstmuseum Ravensburg
Burgstr. 9
88212 Ravensburg
Germany
Hours: Tuesday 2–6pm,
Wednesday–Sunday 11am–6pm,
Thursday 11am–7pm
T +49 751 82810
[email protected]