Image: Alex Mirutziu/ Runway spill #2, 2011, HD video
LA-based Mihai Nicodim Gallery will present at this year’s Armory Show a series of Romanian visual artists. Also, following the 2010 participation to Independent art fair supported by RCINY, Sabot Gallery from Cluj-Napoca feat. Alex Mirutziu continues its presence in NYC during the Armory Week at the contemporary video works art fair Moving Image.
Alex Mirutziu (b. 1981) is a Romanian artist whose work cuts across multiple domains, including conceptual writing, performance, photography and video installations. His work endows social processes with ephemeral emergence as the main constructs in an attempt to reconfigure the relation between information and form, psychophysical language and content, challenging origins and meaning. After the disturbing soloist performance, “Atrocity Exhibition,” in 2004, he continued his research at the University of Fine Arts in Cuenca, Spain, where his performative approach resulted in the suppression of one of his projects, which provoked strong reactions among artists and scholars in both Spain and Romania. Starting in 2004, the investigation of the real began when a new anatomical specimen emerged, Lick&Destroy, a corrupt and ambiguous approach to identity, with which Mirutziu produced himself distinctively in discontinuous, contradictory virtualities. In 2007, the English director, John Britton, formed an experimental master class with eight heterogeneous performers, one of which was Alex Mirutziu. Shortly after the physically intensive training, he toured England with his social-comment performance, Leave Gordon Brown Alone, produced in Liverpool, Leeds and Berlin. He received international recognition in Madrid and Paris at Optica Video Art Festival, and was awarded Best Independent Artist. He frequently worked with Grit Hachmeister, VIP group, Arandjel Bojanovic, Liviana Dan and Noa Treister. Following his “Manifest of Flaw” show at Sabot in October 2009, Alex Mirutziu presented solo projects at Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich, and at Mihai Nicodim in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include: Object-Orientation: Bodies and/as Things, in 2011, at Cerritos College Art Gallery, Norwalk, CA (USA), and Ars Homo Erotica, in 2010, at the National Museum in Warsaw (Poland).
The entity of fashion as a gerund status: fashion – a thing happening now, where the focus is on the emergent, potential ability to signal and set in motion moments during the performance. What is striking in the “Runway spills” videos is the diffusion of focus away from the garment and onto a situation that disrupts a specific convention (falling on the catwalk); the now of runway live performance that sometimes corrupts, and contradicts itself, in its redeployment of functions from the existence of an abstract idea to the tangible production.
