NeXus: Open Fusions
Museum of Art Craiova, 19 August – 9 October 2016

Artists: Paul Neagu, Constantin Brancusi, Tony Cragg, Marianne Eigenheer, Neville Gabie, Anish Kapoor, Vlad Nancă & Nona Inescu, Nigel Rolfe
Live performances: Neville Gabie, Vlad Nancă & Nona Inescu, Nigel Rolfe

Much has been written about the influence of Brancusi’s ideas upon the art of Paul Neagu [1](1938 – 2004), as well as the imprint of the creative sensibility of the latter upon Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Tony Cragg, some of the most well-known figures of the new generation of British sculptors in the 1980s, who were his students in London. In the exhibition space, however, their works have rarely met. In an exploratory approach, this exhibition aims to offer a space of “open fusion” (the title of a series of works by Neagu from the late ’70s), in which these interferences become possible, in which the creation of Neagu itself becomes the subject generator and the catalyst of new configurations and energies, the hyphen between sources which marked his investigations, practices he influenced, discourses he intersected with, both alive and posthumously.

Including over 50 works by the artist from various private collections in Romania, alongside Brancusi’s Kiss from the collection of the museum, as well as contributions by Tony Cragg, Marianne Eigenheer, Neville Gabie, Anish Kapoor, Vlad Nancă & Nona Inescu, and Nigel Rolfe, the exhibition will examine the  existing, potential and emerging connections generated by these presences, with a focus on several concepts relevant for the practice of all participating artists: the essentialization and trans-figuration of the sculptural form; the nomadic nature of modern sculpture; interplay of intensities and temporalities of matter and space; mobility, processuality, transience and limit; virtualities that actualize themselves both in active matter, in the mutual constitution of subjectivities and in the construction of social and cultural history; the complicity between performance and repetition; the metamorphosis of matter into action and action into matter and text.

Download here the exhibition leaflet (English and Romanian).

[1] * Matei Stârcea – Crăciun, Paul Overy, Mel Gooding, John Wood