Tag: Senso Gallery

Ion Iancuț’s Light Seekers

~ theartdive ~ 2 Comments

Earlier this month I saw Ion Iancuț’s personal exhibition Light Seekers (sculpture and pastels) at Senso Gallery here in Bucharest.

Most of the works were quite memorable, as I expected. Here are some of them.

Bronze sculpture by Ion Iancut, titled Light Seekers (2017), at Senso Gallery in Bucharest

Light Seekers, 2017
Bronze
44 x 77 x 6.5 cm (17.32 x 30.31 x 2.55 in)

Look how these Light Seekers seem to rest on their walking sticks, as if they had found something like Archimedes’s fulcrum (“Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”).

Alternatively, I see them pointing down from the sky with sticks like diving rods—rods which point us to the light hidden in our earthly lives, under our worries, disbelief, and general lack of interest in higher forms of existence we could embrace . . . if we only paid attention to the many fulcrums in our paths which could help rise us aloft.

Bronze sculpture by Ion Iancut, titled Accordion (2017), at Senso Gallery in Bucharest

Accordion, 2017
Bronze
17.5 x 47 x 42 cm (6.88 x 18.50 x 16.53 in)

Ion Iancut, The Archers (2017)

The Archers, 2017
Bronze
78.5 x 35 x 49 cm (30.90 x 13.77 x 19.29 in)

Ion Iancut, Tired Angel (2017), personal exhibition at Senso Gallery in Bucharest, June 2018

Tired Angel, 2017
Bronze
43 x 32 x 10 cm (16.92 x 12.59 x 3.93 in)

Ion Iancut, Star Seeker, personal exhibition, Senso Gallery, Bucharest, June 2018

Star Seeker [n.d.]
Pastel on colored cardboard
70 x 50 cm (27.55 x 19.68 in)

Ion Iancuț was born in Răducăneni, Iași county. He graduated from the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1974.

Dumitru Radu, Echo

~ theartdive ~ 2 Comments

dumitru radu_senso_IMG_20171213_145548
Dumitru Radu, Echo [n.d.], Senso Gallery, Bucharest, December 2017
Bronze and marble
30 x 30 x 30 cm
€3,500

dumitru radu_senso_IMG_20171213_145603

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.)

Cristian Pentelescu, The Gate

~ theartdive ~ 2 Comments

Here’s a work I saw at Senso Gallery in Bucharest last fall.

I’ve seen warm marble in Bernini’s Rape of Persephone (where Pluto’s hand sinks into her flesh), pregnant marble in Brancusi’s Beginning of the World (where an ovoid rests on a polished steel plate: the material world and its metaphysical alter in bud), marble draped in lavish folds in Michelangelo’s Pietà, diaphanous in Giovanni Strazza’s Veiled Virgin . . . but I’ve never seen marble quite so soft and elastic as that of Cristian Pentelescu’s in The Gate, or if I did, I don’t remember—

Cristian Pentelescu, sculpture in marble, titled The Gate
Cristian Pentelescu, The Gate, Marble, 35 x 20 x 18 cm (13.8 x 7.9 x 7 in)