An exhibition with: Alexandru Antik, Vioara Bara, Sandor Bartha, Anca Brânzaș, Ioan Bunuș, Mircea Cantor, Tibor Fekete, Dorel Găina, Aniko Gerendi, György Jovián, Ferenczi Károly, Gyöngyi U. Kerekes, Ioan-Aurel Mureșan, Ciprian Mureșan, Dan Perjovschi, Ioan-Augustin Pop, Csongor Szabó, László Ujvárossy

Curator: Ami Barak

The City Art Gallery in the Citadel

September – November 2020

For whom the bell tolls is the title of a novel that Ernst Hemingway published in 1940 and in which the American author plunges us into the atmosphere of the Spanish Civil War. This title was chosen because the exhibition wants to bring together, under the same roof, artists who worked in this city during an emblematic period of history (the 1980s), but also others whose fate linked them in one way or another to Oradea . The book tells the mission of a young American involved in the International Brigades who shares the daily life of a group of guerillas Republicans behind the front lines. Like the American author, this exhibition pays tribute to the employed artists, members of Atelier 35, the Youth Cenacle of the Union of Visual Artists, seen from a certain historical perspective. Their individual or collective approaches were a continuation of the historical Western neo-avant-garde. In the 1980s, their ways of working were not imitated, but they explored needs felt at a assumed distance from the Romanian capital. The approach of this era from the point of view of the locality is conclusive, because it reveals a series of substrates without which certain works or artistic positions cannot be fully understood. The heterogeneous works of these artists were less motivated by belonging to a broad international artistic context, but rather related to a self-definition that was appreciably resistant to the official artistic system, strictly determined by the communist regime in which the forms of expression. they were traditionalist and propagandist. To these Oradean historical figures from the 1980s, we have added some well-known personalities whose fate linked them to this city, and also artists from a newer generation, whose work seemed to us to be a qualitative continuity of their predecessors.

Univ. Assoc. Dr. Ioan Pop