Geta Brătescu: Drawing As a Dance

Today the Rumanian artist Geta Brătescu (1926–2018) is considered to be one of the most outstanding avant-gardists of Eastern Europe. During her lifetime, she used a wide variety of media to investigate the narrative potential of abstract forms by means of serial variations. Drawings constitute the pivot-point of her oeuvre. Brătescu considered drawing to be a physical act, a gesture of the body, in resemblance to a dance through which she explored the world such as it appeared in her surroundings. The solo exhibition extends an arc from 1967 to 2018 and, with nearly fifty works including numerous serial works, is the first presentation of Brătescu’s multifaceted oeuvre in southern Germany.

She first created her playful, experimental art there where it did not seem possible: namely behind the Iron Curtain, in Communist Romania, where Social Realism was the state doctrine. In contrast to painting as “official state art,” Brătescu’s artistic output is determined not by the individual picture, but by the processual works, the principle of series and variation. In spite of state repression, Geta Brătescu insists right from the start on the role of the artist as a representative of free thought and delight in playful experimentation. She repeatedly gives thematic expression, also through the appropriation from world literature of figures embodying resistance, to the significance of the artist in society and of the studio as a production space and a center of mental energy. The point of departure for Brătescu’s collages, as well as for her installational and performative works in photography and film, consists of found everyday materials and her own body. Coming to light in these works is Brătescu’s expanded concept of the drawing as a form of conceptual expression. In her late oeuvre, she replaced the drawing pen with scissors and focused her intensely colored paper-collages on the free “play of forms.”
Curated by Ute Stuffer

A catalogue is being prepared in collaboration with the Verlag für moderne Kunst; along with essays by Sven Spieker and Diana Ursan, it provides access for the first time in the German language to a selection of Brătescu’s own texts, her reflections about art and the world.

Displayed in parallel on the second floor until June 25, 2023 is the collection presentation in the area of classic modernism entitled “FROM FACE TO FACE. TWO SOUTHERN GERMAN COLLECTIONS IN DIALOGUE” and developed on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg.

Accompanying program
April 27, 6pm
Joint exhibition tour with Lorenz Wiederkehr, research assistant at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

June 1, 6pm
Joint exhibition tour with Roland Wäspe, art historian, exhibition organizer, former director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (from 1989 to 2022)