Alex Mirutziu / Opportunistic mise en scene #16 / 2016 / Mixed media on photograph / 20,3 cm x 30,5 cm
Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu explores the fringes of what can be seen or represented. His lightly rendered strokes, referred to as “homeless lines” by the artist, approach the portrayed objects without ever keenly contouring them.
This intended vagueness, leaving room for inconclusiveness, misunderstandings or the indefinable, is also palpable in the artists’ installations and performances. Mirutziu's work surveys the periphery of things and inquires the possibilities of intervention into a fixed order.
Like many artists of his generation growing up in the former eastern bloc, Mirutziu names the wishfully observed culture of the west as an important reference point to his practice. Yet his escape route from the limitations of a post totalitarian Romania wasn’t shaped by the pop cultural iconography that we often see imprinted in contemporary visual aesthetics, but rather radical poetic and philosophical ideas.
Mirutziu's interventions, inscribing bodies, overpainting photographs or installing objects resembling rearview mirrors, often feel crude, direct and brutal. They expose the relationship between concrete reality and subjective actuality as deceptive and constructed. Truth, as reflected in the title of this solo exhibition, is not understood as a moral or absolute category but as an empty center within a complex system of ascriptions, presumptions and fictionalizations.
In his piece „The urgency of the idea of closure in drawing“ Mirutziu will perform alongside his younger self, symbolized by a graphite mask, on the opening night. „The project The Artist as Himself at 29“ (TAH 29) focusses on the instability of self-narrations and the inevitable distortion of past events.
Text by Diana Weis / 2018
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Alex Mirutziu was born 1981 in Sibiu (RO) and lives in Cluj-Napoca (RO). Mirutziu has been lecturing in performance and theatre focused institutions from Royal Academy of Arts, London, to Von Kraal Theatre, Estonia, Konstfack, Stockholm, and collaborated with various artists, among which Grit Hachmeister (DE), Paul Devens (NL), Elias Merino (ES), Graham Foust (US), Graham Harman (US). His most recent projects have been hosted by IASPIS, Stockholm; ZDB, Lisbon; Power Plant, Toronto; The Glass Factory Lab, Boda; Mucsarnok Kusthalle, Budapest; the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, and the National Museum, Warsaw.
6 September - 15 December, 2018
Opening: 5 September 2018, 7pm
Performance: 8pm
Leipziger Str. 47 / Entry Jerusalemer Str., Berlin
