ArtCollect's - Publicul Privat / The Private Public : works selected from five Romanian art collections, curator: Mihnea Mircan
Publicul Privat / The Private PublicCurator: Mihnea Mircan
Artists: Radu Belcin, Horia Bernea, Dan Beudean, Maria Brâneț, Mircea Cantor, Radu Carnariu, Eva Cerbu, Nicolae Comănescu, Radu Comșa, Alex Dascălu, Constantin Flondor, Adela Giurgiu, Ion Grigorescu, Rodrigo Hernández, Nona Inescu, Marcel Janco, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Iosif Király, Alicja Kwade, Matei Lăzărescu, Max Hermann Maxy, Robert Meyten, Daniel Moldoveanu, Ciprian Mureșan, Vlad Nancă, Rosalind Nashashibi, Georgeta Năpăruș, Paul Neagu, Miklós Onucsán, Andrei Pandele, Jules Perahim, Milița Petrașcu, Joanna Piotrowska, Laurian Popa, Silvia Radu, Gheorghe Rasovszky, Eugen Roșca, Serban Savu, Mircea Suciu, Doru TulcanColectionari: Avi Cicirean, Mariana Florescu, Geanina & Tudor Grecu, Alexandru Rus, Ovidiu Șandor.
Works selected from five Romanian art collections chart the space between the public and the private, the folding together of the individual and the collective in the work of the collector. The works compose a metaphorical gradient between those poles, embodying the distinctions and complicating the reciprocities between vectors such as curiosity or obsession, the experiment or the interrogation, which structure private collections and orient them progressively towards the public sphere. In this context, the works ask questions about heritage and dissemination, about possible institutional forms: the museum, the publicly accessible archive, the publication series or any other format in which a personal laboratory opens up to co-opt different communities of interpretation and novel symbolic partnerships. The private collections that the project brings together are each at different stages of this process, questioning their initial premises and modus operandi, pairing a purely subjective exercise of taste and the hypothesis of a future institution to display and historicize the collected works. This does not imply the abandonment of subjective taste but multiplies the criteria and parameters which shape the collection, summons other interlocutors and ramifies the conversations about singular objects and their role in narrating a cultural moment. The exhibition explores this interim, the interweaving of two systems of reference: subjective impulse and responsibility or transparency. They are not mutually exclusive, but become entangled with one another as the intimate language that pervades each collection finds new translations, scales, articulations that can be shared with others. The works in the exhibition make palpable this narrative arc in the cultural performance of the collector, the evolution from a space of private investigation to one of communality and public obligations, from an internal pulse to wider resonance and from personal biography to cultural history.