Jecza Gallery at Paris Photo 2025: From Sigma to New Bucharest School

The Sigma Group artists (1969-1980) Stefan Bertalan, Constantin Flondor and Doru Tulcan, Timisoara, played a major role on the European art scene of the 70s. These artists got into the habit of putting the world into equations, in search of laws and systems that reflected their passion for optics and mechanics, botany and geology, astronomy and all forms of systems capable of translating their obstinate desire to understand the world through observation. It combines constant research photographs and performances, with a questioning of the nature of creation and man's place in our universe. They have produced a rich and consistent body of photographic work, both individually and in groups.

Photography also plays a role in their collaborative, pedagogical approach, and in some projects, they include Iosif Kiraly, then a young student living and studying in Timisoara. The Sigma influence later rubbed off on the experimental program and conceptual attitude of the subReal group, founded in 1990 by Călin Dan and Dan Mihălțianu and joined by Iosif Király in 1991, it functioned as a duet since 1993 when Dan Mihălțianu left. Stamped by post-conceptual attitudes, overstated with irony and self-mockery, subREAL was the first to introduce an operating mode that challenged the viewer's knowledge. Their historical reflection explored the native artistic, institutional context. Over short period they had been flexibly inspired to social and institutional issues.

In 1995 Iosif Király, Radu Igazsag, Roxana Trestioreanu and Calin Dan draw up the program for a department of Photography and Dynamic Imaging that will be founded at UNArte (The National University of ART, Bucarest. Later Valeriu Mladin and Alexandru Patatics will be co-opted into this department, also graduates of the Timisoara High School of Art where taught Flondor and Tulcan. The specific experimental spirit of Sigma as well as the pedagogical system with its roots in Bauhaus is continued through this department at a university level. Laurentiu Ruta will be active for several years in the design department at UNArte, where he will continue formal research specific to the Sigma group (polyhedra and their derivatives) and some of this will be documented photographically.

Some of the former students which integrated this department have initiated in the last years other platforms dedicated to photography as Switch Lab: Dani Gherca, Nicu Ilfoveanu, Michele Bressan.

This generation grew up in the aftermath of the regime change of 1989 and experienced first-hand the transition from communism to capitalism and its long-lasting social, political, economic and urban effects. What unites their practice is a cautious approach to the use of images for various narratives and a meta-reflexive approach to photography as a medium, exploring the notion of the image in all its forms. Experimenting with different modes of presentation, sometimes incorporating found images and text, they seek to transcend the limitations of the still image, expanding its possibilities in the same experimental spirit as the pioneers of the Sigma group. 

Experimental photography in Romania evolved from the Sigma1 Group’s (1970s, Timișoara) Bauhaus-inspired, interdisciplinary experiments and pedagogy programs to subREAL’s (1990s, Bucharest) conceptual, critical use of photography to question post-communist identity. Iosif Király, a student of Sigma and a founding member of subREAL, later became professor at the University of Visual Art in Bucharest and introduced a new school of photography in Bucharest, mentoring artists like Dani Gherca and Michele Bressan. This lineage connects through interdisciplinarity, socio-political engagement, and innovative manipulation of time and space in images. Each group responded to its era – Sigma1 under socialism’s constraints, subREAL during capitalist transition, new Bucharest school of photography amid digital globalisation.

From Sigma’s interdisciplinary experimentation to Gherca’s digital cityscapes, Romanian artists continually reinvent photography to reflect changing realities.