Geta Brătescu
Courtesy Ivan Gallery, © Photo: Ștefan Sava
Gassner, Hubertus, Kölle, Brigitte (ed.), Geta Brătescu, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2016), Cologne, Snoeck, 2016
→Șerban, Alina, Geta Bratescu: The Studio, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2013
Geta Brătescu. Retrospectiva, Muzeul Național de Artă al României, Bucharest, 1999
→Geta Brătescu. Retrospektive, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2016
→Geta Brătescu: An Atelier of One’s Own, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Ghent, 12 September 2017 – 14 January 2018
Geta Brătescu, Art is a Serious Game
Geta Brătescu, Drawings with the Eyes Closed
Romanian visual artist.
Geta Brătescu is one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Romania. Under the communist regime, which became increasingly repressive in the 1970s, she worked as an illustrator and graphic designer for the cultural magazine Secolul 20. Toward the late 1970s, she rented a studio in order to develop her artistic practice; it would become the stage for her temporary installations, performances, and film productions. In the famous film The Studio (1978), Ion Grigorescu, another major figure of Romanian conceptual art, filmed the artist’s performance as she physically interacted with the room around her, as if her surroundings were a living entity endowed with anthropomorphic qualities with which she could communicate daily. The process thus involved drawing objects which she then measured out with her body. Her research on visual performative arts gave rise to the series Towards White (1975), Self-Portrait, Towards White (1975), and From Black to White (1976), in which she plays the part of the main actress in various theatrical sequences.
She is also known to have made use of elements evocative of female sensitivity: fabric, theatre costumes, and mirrors – tools with which she expresses the fragility of the body and of life in general. Her mural installation No to Violence (1974), a mass of fabric and bandages resembling a prosthesis for a tired or deformed body, is a good example this work process.
© 2013 Des femmes – Antoinette Fouque
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
Geta Brătescu, Vestigii [Vestiges], 1978, textile collage on paper, 35 x 50 cm, Collection of Instituto Inhotim, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, © Geta Brătescu, © Photo: Ștefan Sava
Geta Brătescu, Către alb [Towards white], 1975, 9 black and white photographs, mounted on paper, 17 x 17 cm each, collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, © Geta Brătescu, © Photo: Mihai Brătescu
Geta Brătescu, Medeea – 10 ipostaze [Medea – Hypostases X], 1980, coloured drawing with a sewing machine on textile, 90 x 60 cm, collection of MoMA, New York, © Geta Brătescu, © Photo: Ștefan Sava
Geta Brătescu, Nu violenței! [Not violence!], 1974, wood, fabric, bandage, 300 x 270 x 155 cm, collection of Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, © Geta Brătescu
Geta Brătescu, Doamna Oliver în costum de călătorie [Self-portrait as Mrs Oliver in her traveling costume], 1980, black and white photograph, © Geta Brătescu, © Photo: Mihai Brătescu
Geta Brătescu, Regula cercului, regula jocului [The rule of the circle, the rule of the game], 1985, collage and drawing on paper, 65 x 48 cm, collection of SFMoMA, San Francisco, © Geta Brătescu
