FIRE – Mircea Cantor, Miklos Erdely, Constantin Flondor, Iosif Kiraly, Doru Tulcan: Mircea Cantor, Miklos Erdely, Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan (Sigma group) & Iosif Kiraly

Mircea Cantor, Miklos Erdely, Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan (Sigma group) & Iosif Kiraly

Five artists whose work has always been under the sign of experimentation and who have at the same time highlighted an attitude of openness and understanding of the issues of art in the spirit of the avant-garde.

Mircea Cantor (b. 1977) is an artist of Romanian origin who has always considered himself a citizen of the world. His photographic work is rich and sheds light on the flaws and dysfunctions of the human being through the prism of our contemporary society. Poetic and allegorical, his entire work is characterized by this ability to deal with hard and complex subjects but always in an aesthetic suspended between reality and fantasy. He remains focused on human aspirations, meticulously observing our behavior. Questioning the human essence is essential, the artist wishes to deliver a formative work by drawing inspiration from various fields of knowledge in order to give meaning to human existence.

Miklós Erdély (1928-86), was and remains a key figure of the Hungarian avant-garde art scene in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Considered “the father of the new Hungarian avant-garde”, Erdély was a charismatic personality and an extremely important mentor. From 1975 until his death, he taught three conceptually and methodologically related art courses – Exercises in Creativity (1975-76, with Dóra Maurer and György Galántai), Exercises in Fantasy Development (FAFEJ) and Interdisciplinary Thinking (Indigo) – which were conceived as experimental teaching studios or workshops drawing on avant-garde artistic processes, new theories of creativity, pedagogical methods influenced by Eastern philosophical traditions and many other sources. By his own admission, one of his goals as an art educator was to “create an environment in which it might be useful to work.”

SIGMA (1969 – 1981), one of the most interesting groups of the Romanian neo-avant-garde mixed art with science and technology, functioned as a collective in the traditional sense. The group was founded in 1969 by Stefan Bertalan, Constantin Flondor, and Roman Cotoșman; after the latter’s run away, it was replaced by several artists, including Doru Tulcan. SIGMA’s activities were based on two main pillars: the creation of a new artistic lexicon and the development of a progressive form of pedagogy. For the group, geometry was the foundation of reference, its rules re-evaluated in a changing reality. When asked about the inspiration he draws from abstract art, Flondor says that SIGMA’s practice has never been about abstraction, but about the concrete aspects of geometry, architecture and nature.

Iosif Kiraly (b.1957), once a student of Sigma Group, Kiraly is a Romanian visual artist, architect, and educator. He works both independently and within the subREAL group. Favorite media: photography, installation, performance, and drawing. His work investigates the relationship between perception, time, and memory. In 1995, he was among the founders of the Department of Photography and Media Arts at the National University of Arts (UNArte) in Bucharest, where he is presently a professor. In the 1980s, he became active in the mail art network, an international underground movement with roots in Fluxus.