Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Bucharest

ICONOFLUX brings together works by Horia Bernea, Florin Mitroi, Ion Dumitriu, Mihai Sârbulescu, Alexandru Chira, Bogdan Vlăduță, Gili Mocanu, Anca Mureșan, Ciprian Mureșan, Șerban Savu, Diana Popuț, and Eva Chapkin. First presented this summer at the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, as part of Praxis! Emergent Curator's Days, the exhibition has been reconfigured for the Arsmonitor space in Bucharest. The selection of works was rethought in relation to the gallery's architecture and dimensions, while the list of artists remained unchanged. ICONOFLUX stems from a series of inquiries into the way the iconic of a sacred nature circulates in contemporary Romanian art from the 1970s to the present. As a research-based curatorial project, the present exhibition is the first in a broader series, which does not aim to provide definitive answers and conclusions, but to make visible a wide spectrum of possible correspondences between generations, historical contexts, and different - sometimes divergent - artistic mediums. Looking from the present toward the past, the micro-selection of artists highlights multifaceted typologies of the sacred-profane antinomy. In this retrospective inquiry, the theme under reflection traces the way in which what appears sacred transgresses the boundaries of art history and local historical circumstances, while what appears profane often retains references to the sacred iconic. What was once an explicit symbol of the sacred may today be emptied of its original meaning, while other symbolic forms make indirect references to spirituality through technique, quotation, reference, or appropriation. ICONOFLUX traces precisely this flux of the iconic between the sacred and the profane, revealing the persistence of forms and formulas that transcend historical and generational circumstances.

Wild Metaphysics brings together six contemporary Brazilian artists whose practices explore the extraordinary, the oneiric, and the metaphysical. Forms and colors intertwine and dissolve into nonlinear narratives capable of collapsing the limits between object and ground, figuration and abstraction, wakefulness and dream, the conscious and the unconscious. The exhibition delves into cartographies of the imagination that extend beyond physical spaces, creating singular universes in which the boundaries between reality and fantasy become porous. Here, gestural abstraction takes precedence over representation, resisting fixed formal categories, remaining neither explicit nor literal. The ultimate impression is that what lies before the eye is somehow still in motion. Wild Metaphysics is inevitably permeated by literature, drawing from magical realism, fantastic literature, and the infinite field of possibilities that fiction opens up beyond the real, a realm in which the supernatural can coexist with

The Black Sea ^ whose millennial legends drift freely, sometimes running aground in the sand like shipwrecks. The Black Sea ^ a place of exile and refuge, a site of summer desires triggering atypical temporalities, an almost completely uncharted ecosystem hosting creatures

For the past year I have been waiting for something to happen. I don’t know exactly what. I thought I would recognize it when it came. After this trip, maybe. After this exhibition. When I move. When I leave. Next month. In the meantime, life became strangely full. My apartment was always filled with sun. From the window I could see Marché Central. My friends lived five minutes away and we made dinner, went dancing, played very bad music. I bought a guitar and learned a few things. I watched films until morning, sometimes three in one night. For a while I thought I wanted to make cinema. I walked through Casablanca a lot. Some days I felt completely visible and some days I felt like I was speaking to people from underneath the ground.