The oeuvre of the intermedia artist Alex Mirutziu includes photography, performance, sculpture, painting, graphic art, and video art. Mirutziu calls the recently deceased singer David Bowie one of his role models. And so, the young Romanian artist also routinely breaks with conventional representations of masculinity and femininity in his works. Mirutziu’s artistic language is closely related to the 'performative turn' and offers social interpretations and concepts of cultural change in the form of staged settings and the investigation of rituals. His approach goes beyond concepts of Body Art through questioning terms of 'Gestalt' or the 'Apparatus'.
In his most recent cycle, consisting of drawings and etchings, Mirutziu references the works of the Milan-based sculptor Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931). Wildt’s works are hard to describe in precisely defined artistic categories: At times they seem like works which draw on a quiet classicism but also owe a great deal to Art Nouveau and Symbolism, and in his self-portraits captured in moments of painful distress, Wildt is on the precipice of expressionism. Alex Mirutziu picks up on this visual language in his own works: The lines of his portraits are expressive and informed by a dramatically Mannerist mimicry. The pen strokes are nervous but resolute. Portraits take shape in the repeated continuations of lines which explore temporality, excitement, and changes of mental states. In addition to the works on paper, this solo exhibition shows Mirutziu’s sculptural works. Their fragile physicality and the integration of living plants touch on subject areas such as death, transience, creation, and transformation.
Alex Mirutziu describes his approach of drawing as follows:
„In my drawings I make use of jagged lines which I call 'bastard lines’ or 'homeless lines’. This method of drawing with lines do not follow the contour of things but entail a movement of an alien, almost uncanny hand. My hand doesn't account for the mind of what it should draw. I trained my hand to attack the paper and to create an instantaneous texture of lines and not to show the immediately apparent. My drawings are generated without any pretence of continuity. It is much more fetching to build a climate in drawing than representing the object or subject. I want to momentarily suspend meaning, to question closure even for a brief moment.“
Alex Mirutziu was born in 1981 in Sibiu, Romania. He lives and works in Romania and England and lectures at various European institutions such as the Royal College of Arts, London, the Von Krahl Theater in Tallinn, and the Konstfack University in Stockholm. Recent projects have been presented at the ZdB in Lisboa, The Power Plant in Toronto, Mücsarnok Budapest, the National Museum in Warsaw, and the Biennale di Venezia.
(S. Kunz)
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