Art Pickings from Exhibitions, Articles, Books, and the Web
Watercolors by Ioana Nicoară, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, November 2017
Upon seeing them, I had the sense right away that they visualize inner life. Inner life of the cells, or, barring that (we think of cells as contained and never quite imagine them at further microscopic levels), the life of our emotions permeating us like breaths or whooshing over us, coming together with neurons that fire sparks of thought—and cells responding to all that energy, electric . . .
Dumitru Radu, Echo [n.d.], Senso Gallery, Bucharest, December 2017
Bronze and marble
30 x 30 x 30 cm
€3,500
This figure doesn’t move inside the bell, so it’s not quite a bell clapper, but with its trumpet and openings in its body, it suggests to me someone who has embraced a certain space of meaning—themes from his past, for instance—and turns to that space—that of the bell—to amplify his concerns, his voice growing in the echo of others who have worked before him (in this respect, to me the bell he’s echoing into could be the trumpet of a predecessor like him).
This type of bell is, in fact, in Dumitru Radu’s oeuvre some kind of funnel, one that brings us in and out of existence, and also a musical instrument through which the music of God resonates. For more about this approach see this presentation by Luiza Barcan at Simeza Art Gallery in Bucharest in 2014. (The talk is in Romanian but the video shows many of Radu’s recent sculptures.)
The Art Dive 