Ion Grigorescu “L’Homme – Centre de l’Univers” at Gregor Podnar, Vienna

With a selection of photographs, collages, drawings, sculptures and paintings, the exhibition highlights the artist’s longstanding interest in depicting the body, quotidian life, and individual’s intimate endeavours as a foundation of his varied practice. Thereby pointing to the remarkable continuity of Grigorescu’s artistic preoccupations and his longstanding ethical engagement. In this exhibition context, the film L’Homme – Centre de l’Univers by Grigorescu is also being shown, which gives the exhibition its title: Here, the film goes beyond traditional storytelling and serves as an investigative tool that explores his bodily movements and reflects the artist’s holistic understanding of the world.

Regarded as one of the most influential figures in Romanian art, Grigorescu began working during the 1960s in the privacy of his studio with only the camera bearing witness to his actions and performances. Using his own body as the main subject of his work much like his friend and peer Geta Brătescu, he explored the limits of the human body and quietly addressed the issues of gender and sexuality. Within the intimate surroundings of Grigorescu’s life, artistic practice and household chores often merged, giving new meaning to the elements of simple communal existence in acts of washing, sleeping and eating, while on many occasions also referring to the heritage of Romanian culture, to which he frequently returned in his later photographic works and works on paper. Grigorescu’s performances captured in photographs and on film attest to his non-conformist attitude to the political discourse of the time. Similar domestic form of ideological resistance can be noted in allusions to sacrifices, secrets and initiation, reminiscent of Orthodox iconography, seen in many of the works on display. Besides his experimental approach to performance and film, Grigorescu has disassembled photography and merged the medium with drawing and sculpture. Through such formal interventions, the artist has reassembled the narratives of his own and of the found photographs belonging to others. Deemphasising the visual and material importance of the artwork, he has given way in these works to the surrealist drive to expose the workings of the unconscious by resorting to psychoanalysis.

at Gregor Podnar, Vienna
until May 31, 2025