Eugen Gâscă. Retrospective, Galeria Quadro

From the curatorial statement:

"Our exhibition is the first retrospective to be mounted since the artist’s death (the last was in 1978-9) and is thus in a position to look at the full range of his oeuvre, including the works that date from the final decade of the artist’s working life – these being of great relevance to the fulfilment of his artistic vision.

This event brings together a substantial series of works dating from the 1930s, when the young artist achieved an early artistic synthesis. These works were shown in a personal exhibition at Cluj in 1934, when the disturbing modernity of his voice made itself heard. Conscious as he was of the fragility of life, his painting springs from concomitant feelings of sadness, hope and joy.

By tracing the artist’s career both as a painter and as a graphicist, the exhibition gives an overview of his manner of thinking and creating. The drawings and watercolours are not independent of the pictures but precede their realisation. However, they are not mere sketches but essays at tuning into a rhythm, actions aimed at creating greater depth and steps towards reaching the essence of the theme.

After a period of experimentation, that of the “compulsory” realist stage of the 1950s – during which he achieved renown for his successful historical painting Horia and his Captains – from the 1960s onwards he returned to the visual universe of his youth and took it further: his figures set in the landscape, angel-like silhouettes that are merely suggested, unreal, have mysterious concerns of their own; they do not initiate action but are subject to the rituals and rhythms of rich inner lives. The symbiosis between man and nature – with the hills and poplars characteristic of the artist’s native region, the Mureș valley – is cosmic and metaphysical in nature, with everything appearing to be composed of the same substance, expressed by the use of cold shades of bluey-green that recall the suffused glow of frescoes.

Alike through the subjects of his youth (The Flight to Egypt, Crucifixion, Christ) and through the spirit of his entire oeuvre, Gâscă’s art shows us a sensitive and deeply spiritual individual who as a result of his personal experiences succeeded in reinventing the iconography of Christian art and reinvesting it with meaning.

For the very first time we are also exhibiting the works – watercolours and paintings – that the artist produced in his final years, a collection entitled Joy. This was a period in which explicit references to Biblical themes were not permitted, but these are works in which the joy of the Resurrection can be seen: the artist’s final luminous synthesis, full of hope. This is the chef d’oeuvre of someone who has reached old age, at peace with his own life, free now from the trials of a precarious existence that had overshadowed all his earlier years, and sure of his artistic creed.

The major part of the exhibition is constituted by a collection which has been preserved in the care of the artist’s family and that includes examples from the whole of his creative period. Loans from private collections in Romania and abroad also make a substantial contribution. The value of the exhibition is enhanced by our collaboration with the Mureș County Museum - Târgu Mureș Art Museum, which holds an important Eugen Gâscă endowment.

We would also like to use the opportunity of this retrospective to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Quadro Gallery – a gallery devoted to researching and promoting significant works and phenomena of twentieth-century art in Romania."

Sebestyén Székely

Source of the text: www.galeriaquadro.ro