ion grigorescu - from static oblivion

alt="Ion Grigorescu From static oblivion book spread"

alt="Ion Grigorescu From static oblivion book printing sheet"

My mind is blank...
For days, for years. Unable to see some possible life...
The clock ticks, it is late, silence weeps, and time is not... George Bacovia

works / texts ion grigorescu
concept / editing giuliana prucca
graphic design vito raimondi

soft cover
352 pages
size 30 x 16 cm
papers buckram light white, duo oktav
b/w and color images, drawings
english / romanian
october 2016

PRESS KIT ︎︎︎

press review

alt="Ion Grigorescu Trap trap de potcoave film still"

fotolibros y algo mas
who needs another photoblog
revista arta
tique

Photo Text Book Award - Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017 / The best photography books of the year - PhotoEspaña 17 - shortlisted

ION GRIGORESCU
From static oblivion

A reflection about the status of the image as a balance of forces in tension and a paradoxical act of cancellation of the body through its own representation.

In Ion Grigorescu’s work, as in the book, the body is continually shown in different ways - from photography to film, from performance to drawing - and yet it remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one. As it is impossible to show his art during the regime, it ends up hiding, disappearing inside the image. Instead of showing, the image conceals, because it is non-documentary and non-transmittable; it is an act of birth, a prove of the artist’s resistance, especially as a human being inside (or against) any geographical or historical background. In the rituals of his gestures and in the symbolism of his performances, Grigorescu finds a way to stay alive, preserving his own intellectual status while also defending the dignity of everyday life.

The book traces the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of his work, which inscribes itself into the space of the body and of the world. Grigorescu absorbs elements of the surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life: his act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough techniques to uncover the fiction of art, to denounce the artifice of representation and to affirm images as an instrument of subversive power.

Ion Grigorescu (Bucharest, 1945) is one of the most significant Romanian contemporary artists of the Post-War period and an iconic figure of the conceptual and performative art since the early 70s. He represented Romania at Venice Biennial in 1997 and 2011; his works are in the main public collections, such as MoMA, New York; mumok and Erste Foundation, Vienna; Tate Modern and Deutsche Bank AG, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris.

www.gregorpodnar.com

special online price

[please contact us if you need more than one copy or if you wish a signed copy]

With "Around the table" Ion Grigorescu makes use of his eloquent poetic language of intimate bodily metaphors by which he investigates the relationship between the body and society in a powerful phenomenological and ritualized interpretation. This piece cleverly proposes to the viewer a multiple visual perception, that of the artist moving around a fixed object and then, by directing our vision towards an inner object, the viewer is immersed in another way of seeing and therefore a different sensory and bodily way of being in the world. A multiple vision is therefore provided through an embodied experience.