Spirals and Mysteries: Ștefan Bertalan - opening 16 oct. 2026, 18:00, Jecza Gallery Timișoara

Spirals and Mysteries brings together drawings and experimental photographs through which Ștefan Bertalan investigated the relationships between vegetal growth, geometric order and human existence. Across sunflowers, cauliflower, iris and wild angelica, the natural world emerges as a living system in whose transformations the artist recognises his own participation.

Informed by his engagement with constructivism, bionics and systems theory, Bertalan’s practice brings analytical observation into contact with intuition and speculation. The arrangement of sunflower seeds, the branching structures of cauliflower and the unfolding of leaves offer ways of thinking about how forms develop and relate. In the black-and-white photographs, drawn interventions carry this enquiry across the surface of the image: lines and geometric figures trace correspondences between visible structures and imagined orders.

His experiment of living for 130 days with a sunflower gives this research an intimate, temporal dimension. Following the plant from germination to decline, Bertalan makes observation a sustained encounter with another life. The botanical studies and the vegetal body of Self portrait (1986) suggest a movement from studying nature towards locating oneself within it.

The exhibition’s title holds together these intertwined impulses. The spiral evokes the recurring structures of growth; mystery names what remains unresolved through measurement and description. Between them, Bertalan’s images articulate a search for connection in which knowledge, vulnerability and imagination continually reshape one another.

Epigraph: Ștefan Bertalan, quoted in Krzysztof Kościuczuk, “I Have Been Communicated Mysteries over the Phone: Ştefan Bertalan,” Mousse Magazine, 8 June 2023. The article cites Erwin Kessler (ed.), The Self-Punishing One (Bucharest: Romanian Cultural Institute, 2010), p. 79.