4.

Serban Savu (1978, RO)
Manastur Bridge 1
2007
oil on canvas
27 × 40 cm

Under the communist regime, political and social experiments were put in motion in order to give shape to the utopia of the ‘New Man’.  The reality proved to be a dystopia of mass urbanisation, displacement and alienation.  Dennis Hopper presented an American counterpart to this, making visible the isolation and alienation of the individual within the utopia of ‘the American Dream’.  In Şerban Savu’s works, the depicted scenes are always illuminated on the side of the viewer, creating an intimacy between the viewer and the image.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

5.

Cao Fei (1978, CN)
People’s Limbo in RMB City, 2009
DVD 18’58”
Edition

RMB-City – named for the currency used in Hong Kong – is the virtual city in the online world of Second Life.  In the film People’s Limbo in RMB City, boundaries of time and culture are dissolved.  Historical characters who have had an important influence on the financial world, such as Karl Marx or one of the Lehman brothers, provide insight into the disillusionment of the successive financial upheavals that the youngest generation in both the Far East and the West are experiencing.  Images of the hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta, which was born out of the urban and cultural explosion in China, are the backdrop of this epic story, and merge with images from Chinese painting and other traditions.  (collectie G+W nederland)

6A.

AVL/ Joep van Lieshout  (1963, NL)
Biogas and water treatment plant
2006
ink on canvas
109 x 208 cm

Since the 1980s, Joep van Lieshout has been making objects in brightly-colored polyester, the material that would become his trademark in the years thereafter.  In 1995 he established the Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), whereby the myth of the ‘individual artistic genius’ was undermined.  Recurrent themes in van Lieshout’s work are self-sufficiency, power, and politics, often connected to the more classic themes of life and death.

Slave City can be described as a sinister dystopian project that is extremely rational, efficient, and profitable (with 7 million net profit per year).  Values, ethics, aesthetics, morals, food, energy, economics, organisation, management, and the market are turned inside-out, mixed, and formulated and designed anew in a city of 200,000 residents.  The ‘residents’ must work 7 hours every day in offices or one of the other workplaces before they are allowed to relax for 3 hours, after which they sleep for 7 hours.  ‘Slave City’ is the first ‘energy-neutral city’; it is a green city where everything gets reused and recycled – a city that does not waste the world’s resources.  (collectie G+W nederland)

6B.

AVL
Female Slave University
2006      
clay, steel, paint
74 x 57 x 108 cm

(collectie G+W nederland)

7.

Gabriela Vanga (1977, RO)
Pavel
2006
glass, white sand
life size

The passage of time is presented in two ways in this glass object.  The baby bottle is simultaneously an hourglass, through which images of care and mortality, birth and death, close tenderness and the ephemeral all intermingle.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

8.

Mircea Cantor (1977, RO)
I shot this image because it is highly suggestive within a specific circle
2006
light box
60 x 80 cm

Mircea Cantor photographs a ‘careless’ reality as a kind of reverse ready-made.  He ties images that have a natural presence in every day life to images out of the reservoir of art history, images that are stored in the backs of our minds that color our view of reality.  The urinals in the photograph recall Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made objects.  In 1974, Joseph Beuys had himself locked behind a fence in an American gallery along with several coyotes, as a protest against the hegemony of America;  the rejected urinals look like the barrels of a cannon pointed downward.  (Mircea Pinte Collection) 

9.

Natalya Pershina-Gluklya (1969,  RUS)
I wake up every morning at 6am and read Hegel. Sonya’s dress.
2010
embroidered cotton, clothes hanger
120 x 50 cm

Gluklya founded Factory of Found Clothing (FFC) with Olga Egorova, a feminist collective opposed to the capitalist consumer mentality.  In a manifesto she writes ‘The place of the artist is on the side of the weak.  Weakness makes a person human, and it is by overcoming weakness that heroes are born.’ Her projects combine performance, installation, environmental works, and video to explore dualities and relations between, for instance, male/female or internal/external.  In this work we see two images that seem to be contradictory, which in the same manner as Hegel’s philosophy brings our understanding of the dualities that exist in the world around us to a new level.  (collectie G+W nederland)

10.

Adrian Ghenie (1977, RO)
Stalin’s Tomb
2006
oil and acrylic on canvas
30 x 73 cm

For centuries painting was the primary medium used to document major historical events.  Rulers and royalty had their actions documented on canvas, commissioned portraits, and showed off their riches in paintings.  Adrian Ghenie follows in this classical tradition, as master storyteller and master painter, but at the same time he turns the tradition on its head.  The historical figures that he portrays in his works often show the ‘dark side’ of history.  A side of history, however, that often sprung from good intentions and grand ideas – such as a scientific discovery or an idealistic utopia.  Ghenie explains: ‘I am interested in the presence of evil, or more precisely, how the possibility for evil is found in every endeavor, even in those scientific projects which set out to benefit mankind.’  In his paintings we see Hitler and the key figures surrounding him, the Nazi’s vacation home (‘the Berghof’), the tombs of Stalin and Lenin, or a portrait of Ceaucescu.  The masterful technique of his paintings is often ‘problematized’ by allowing the subject to disappear in the paint, whereby the stories of the ‘master storyteller’ become almost unintelligible.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

11.

Job Koelewijn  (1962, NL)
Relief 1 feb 2006 – 24 march 2009
2011
wood, books, cassette tapes (712 hours)
140 x 200 x 30 cm

Job Koelewijn has built a varied oeuvre over the past twenty years in which poetry and literature have often functioned as a direct source of inspiration.  In February 2006 the artist started with a continuous reading project, each day recording himself while reading out loud from a diverse range of books – from Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, to the Songbook of David Bowie to The I Ching. Each book was read from front to back, for precisely 45 minutes a day (one side of a cassette tape).

For the artist this daily repetition has become a ritual that nurtures the brain much like a meditation. Language becomes a mental workout, activating, alerting, and in Koelewijn’s case, creating peace of mind.

The title of this personal library Relief 1 feb 2006 - 24 march 2009 is  referring to the different heights of each row of cassette tapes as well as to the relief in our mind that came into existence through art and culture.  (collectie G+W nederland)

12.

Ciprian Mureşan  (1977, RO)
Untitled (Shopping Cart)
2010
shopping cart, books
102 x 110 x 59 cm

In Untitled (Shopping Cart), Ciprian Mureşan dissects the canon of art and history with wit and humor.  Hastily stacked editions of Franz Kafka’s Das Schloss lie in a shopping cart – by nature a symbol of consumerism.  The protagonist, referred to as ‘K.’, of Kafka’s unfinished novel,  tries to gain access to the mysterious authorities of the castle which for unknown reasons reign over the village.  By bringing together the two great ideologies of the 20^th century – capitalism and communism – Mureşan’s work carries an iconoclastic echo.  (collectie G+W nederland)

13.

Aurélien Froment  (1976, FR)
Table de Rappel / Table of Recall
2008/2011
table (steel and glass), 121.92 x 121.92 x 75 cm, 3 folding chairs
96 playing cards, each 7.6 x 7.6 cm

Table of Recall is based on the popular children’s memory game in which a number of square cards are placed on a table and turned over repeatedly in order to find a second identical card. In Froments’s version we see 96 cards with which the audience is invited to play. The cards are all ‘post-it’ yellow on the backside and have different images on the front side. Instead of 48 pairs, Froment’s game has 96 different cards. The images are selected in pairs, so you can still ‘invent’ a memory game from it.  The images come from the artists own archive, thus also shedding light on different key concepts of his work such as projection, resemblance and error.  (collectie G+W nederland)

14.

Cristi Pogăcean (1980, RO)
Breaking Heart
2004-2005
gold

Cristi Pogăcean retrieves his forms, images, rituals, and techniques from the warehouse of prefabricated dreams and imprinted ideals, and uses these anew.  He strips them of their rhetoric and their fixed interpretations by recycling them in a very personal and playful manner.

The gold medallion is cut in the shape of Romania, and shows the borderline separating it from Moldova.  The Republic of Moldova is an Eastern-European country that was officially established in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.  It lies between Romania and the Ukraine.  When Romania became a member of the European Union in 2007, 800,000 Romanians from the Republic of Moldova applied for Romanian nationality.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

15.

Hans Op de Beeck (1969, BE)
Room (#5)
2009
lambda print mounted on aluminum with plexiglass
180 x 110 cm
edition of 5/ 2 AP

The photo Room (#5) is part of a series of 7 photographs, each containing one man or one women in a typological space, such as a modernist bedroom, or in this work, a classical castle-like interior.  The interiors are painstakingly rendered in a historical central perspective, with a single vanishing point.  The medium of photography gives the appearance of an existing reality, but the works of Hans Op de Beeck are almost completely constructed.  The interiors are computer-made, the actors are photographed in the studio and then placed in the interiors.  The actors are all sunk into a moment of mental absence, a moment in which no action or activity takes place.  Through this displacement of time, activity, and space, a seemingly everyday reality gives rise to a part melancholic, part meditative reflection on our culture.  (collectie G+W nederland)

16.

Victor Man (1974, RO)
Untitled
2007
ceramics, gold
13.3 x 18. 1 cm each

Victor Man’s funerary ceramics portray consecutive scenes from Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film Nosferatu.  A dark, mysterious character marks the doors of houses which are contaminated by the plague, whereby the symbol of the cross serves to exclude and condemn those inside, and as seen in contemporary society, to marginalize and even demote people to a class of non-persons.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

17.

Ulay & Marina Abramović   (1943, DE/ 1946, YU)
Modus Vivendi  (Marina in Traditional Dress)
1985
unique vintage Polaroid, Boston Studio, USA, mounted on aluminum and framed
240 x 112 cm

This work by Ulay & Marina Abramović is part of the series Modus Vivendi, which includes 12 large polaroid images.  Modus vivendi, or modes of life, is a recurrent theme in their oeuvre.  In each work in the series we see Marina or Ulay in different poses, related to the activity of the day.  In this work, Marina is dressed in a traditional Serbian dress, walking behind a plant.  Marina dressed in a different color every day for one week, which corresponded to the day, date, and year according to a numerological scheme.  The works were made using a special polaroid which allowed life-size images.  The passing by the tree, the traditional dress, and the somewhat mechanical movement recall memories of transition.  ‘Life is art’ is a central starting point in the oeuvre of Ulay and Marina Abramović.  In this series , the use of the polaroid camera contributes to the almost instantaneous repetition in which life appears as art.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

18.

Ciprian Mureşan (1977, RO)
Leap into the Void,  After Three Seconds
2004
photography
140 x 97 cm

More than 50 years ago, Yves Klein made his ‘Leap into the Void’, an exalted leap into space that would become iconic for art and the position of the artist in the 1950s.  Ciprian Mureşan uses the iconography of this photograph, but this time recorded on a Romanian street after just three seconds have lapsed from the initial ‘leap’.  Through a small, playful modification, an entirely different interpretation arises about art and the position of the artist in the first decade of the 20^th century in Romania.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

19.

Viviane Sassen (1972, NL)
Nungwi
2010
pigmented inkjet print
40 x 50 cm

Viviane Sassen grew up in Kenya, and often uses images of people and places from the African continent in her photography.  The choice of subjects and images are commonplace; images of the landscape, children playing, the poverty of the slums, or patients with no hope of recovery or survival.  The starting point for her works is her sketchbooks, wherein drawings, observations, quotes, and polaroids have been recorded.  Only after this is all collected does she use the camera to make either spontaneous or staged photographs—often in collaboration with the models.  Through these simple images, Sassen gives rise to deeper layers of consciousness and touches on more general conditions of human nature.  (collectie G+W nederland)

21.

István László (1981, RO)
Revolution 1989
2008-2009
30 stamps
22 x 32 cm

The image of the tank on the postage stamp appeared in many newspapers and magazines as an icon of the Revolution in Romania in 1989.  The tank, filled with cheering people waving the Romanian flag, looms up out of the mist like a ship on the sea.  Instead of large, historical paintings that often keep the memory of such moments alive, László recalls this moment on a stamp – by nature and format tied to small narratives, to descriptions and memories – which are traded between people in handwritten letters.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

22.

Emo Verkerk  (1955, NL)
Danilo Kiš
mixed media
60 x 50 cm

The writers, poets, philosophers, and painters that Emo Verkerk depicts are a gallery of close friends and intimates, as a result of an assemblage of painting and other media.  Danilo Kiš (1935 – 1989) was a Yugoslavian writer, born in Subotica, a North-Serbian city in the kingdom of Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenians.  He was the son of a Hungarian-Jewish father and a Serbian mother.  Judaism, orthodox Christianity, and the mix of Hungarian and Serbian culture formed the fertile ground on which his work took shape.  (collectie G+W nederland)

23.

Natasja Kensmil (1973, NL)
Sergej and Ella
2008
oil on canvas
200 x 200 cm

Sergej and Ella was painted in a period in which Natasja Kensmil often portrayed historical rulers.

The conservative and cruel Russian Grand Duke Sergei Romanov (1857 – 1905) and his wife Ella (1864 – 1918), known for her kindheartedness and piety, are presented here in stately and somber 19^th-century clothing and stance.  Skulls take the place of their faces.  Their surroundings are made up of chicken, salamander, and human embryos.  For these, Natasja Kensmil used the illustrations of 19^th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel.  Portraits of other rulers from this period (Jenny and Karl Marx, Victoria and Albert, Czar Nicholas I) show a connection to each other in their frightening visions and gruesome scenes.  In this way, life and death are brought together in these paintings.  (collectie G+W nederland)

24.

Cristi Pogăcean (1980, RO)
The Abduction from the Seraglio
2006
woolen carpet, manufactured
110 x 160 cm

The Abduction from the Seraglio, a story made popular through Mozart’s opera, is a popular theme in Romania, which is often depicted on tapestries in Romanian folk art.  The iconology of oriental architecture and galloping horses is based on the 18^th-century Western interpretations of the East.  Pogăcean turns the traditional kidnapping scene around and offers an image of a contemporary scene in an Arab land, wherein several Romanian journalists were taken hostage and held at gunpoint by their kidnappers.  Here again, Pogăcean emphasizes how meanings and definitions shift in the course of different traditions.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

25.

Cristi Pogăcean (1980, RO)
2544
2006
video, 5'

2,544 meters above sea level, a young man climbs Moldoveanu Peak with a flag in his hand.  On the flag is a portrait of the artist himself.  The man carrying the flag is the owner of the gallery that represents him, Mihai Pop.  In the contemporary art world, the artist is a ‘brand’, that is carried to peaks – or valleys – by the gallery holder.  As in other works, Pogăcean makes use of the visual imagery of a people’s anarchy – in this case an image that brings to mind a patriotic struggle – in order to compare this to practices in the world of contemporary art.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

26.

Ciprian Mureşan (1977, RO)
Choose
2005
DVD/ PAL
41 ‘’

Ciprian Mureşan’s works contain many allusions to Romanian history and culture, and specifically to the transition from the communist past to the contemporary reality of capitalism.  Through the eyes of children, historical events are often interpreted or observed in sometimes hilarious, sometimes simple or disarming ways.  In the communist era, not only were there two Europes – east and west – but there were also two separate cola regions.  Coca-Cola was distributed in Western Europe, while Pepsi-Cola was distributed in the East.  The child in the film pours both brands into one glass and drinks them together.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

27.

Ni Haifeng (1964, CN)
Commodities and Money
2007
c-print, ed. 3
126 x 155 cm

Ni Haifeng moved from China to Europe in the mid-90s.  This was a period wherein globalization was felt in the form of the rise in world economies and the exchange of culture and goods.

The Netherlands and China had shared a prosperous trade relationship in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, a period in which the predominant system of rule was colonialism.  Patterns of colonialism and globalism are themes often seen in Ni Haifeng’s work.  ‘Commodities and Money’ shows a page out of Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’, wherein the balance between paid work and capital is analysed.  (collectie G+W nederland)

28.

Meschac Gaba (1961, Benin)
Untitled (Souvenier shop installation 5)
2010
mixed media
dimensions variable

Meschac Gaba has worked on the Museum of Contemporary African Art (MCAA) since 1997, wherein the museum itself is presented as a work.  The museum has 12 rooms, referring to the 12 apostles and the 12 months of the year.  He combines the West-European model of the museum with African art traditions in the museum.  The changing globalized economic and artistic reality of both models – European and African – require new interpretations.  The MCAA is a nomadic project in which each new part is shown in various exhibitions.  A souvenir shop can be found in every museum, where t-shirts with texts and images from artists are sold.  Obama, American with African roots and representative of the new America, is pictured here on children’s shirts.  (collectie G+W nederland)

29.

Ciprian Mureşan (1977, RO)
Un Chien Andalou
2004
15 drawings, storyboard for a 3D animation
21 x 29.7 cm each

In Bunuel’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (‘An Andalusian Dog’), a dreamlike sequence of images shows the eyeball of a woman as it is sliced open with a razor interlaced with images of a similarly shaped cloud that obscures the moon.  It drifts across the moon in the same direction as the movement of the knife, thus guiding the viewer’s gaze.  In this way a sinister scene becomes tied to a surrealistic – or as Bunuel states – psychoanalytic interpretation.  In Ciprian Mureşan’s script for the film ‘Un Chien Andalou’,  the scene is performed by the good-natured ‘Shrek’ from the popular children’s movie.  Just as the image of the cloud leads the viewer from one interpretation to another, so does Shrek’s ‘reenactment’ provide a new interpretation that has the ability to change and dispossess the historical meanings of the film.  (Mircea Pinte Collection)

30.

Victor Man (1974, RO)
Untitled (Black Canopies)
2006
oil on canvas , acrylic on plastic (2 sheets)
75 x 96 cm, 42 x 29,5 cm per sheet

(Mircea Pinte Collection)

32.

Jan de Cock (1976, BE)
2007
module 126
Denkmal 4, Casa del Fascio, Piazza del Popolo 4, Como 2006.
Module CXII
William L. Broecker, Current 35mm practice, New York: Morgan & Morgan, 1975
Denkmal 4, Casa del Fascio, Piazza del Popolo 4, Como 2006. Fig. M116
Denkmal 11, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, 2007.
M162-D11-17122007 W Sculpture in chipboard, construction wood and melamine
paper; riga walnut glossy and red
mixed media, box + drawing

The works of Jan de Cock are simultaneously autonomous and fractions of larger installations.  The installations are often tied to each other in space and time.  De Cock articulates precise and often apparently inconspicuous details in a plane, a form, or a space.  He creates a rhythm using the formal achievements of Modernism – in form and line – and the effect of modern artwork on the viewer.  In addition he calls up memories and recollection by making use of references in titles, photos of other artworks – including his own – and of inspiring or meaningful locations and images.  (collectie G+W nederland)

33.

Sebastian Nebe (1982, DE)
Hütte (From the ‘ Untitled’ Settings Series)
2007
oil on papier
149 x 215 cm

Sebastian Nebe, who studied in Leipzig and works in Berlin, remembers the Volksgarten-complexes and huts which stood on the land and in the woods just outside of the city from his youth.  They were places to grow fruit and vegetables and spend vacations relaxing, withdrawn from the communist-led economy.  Decades later, in 2007, these structures stand on plots of land that are being threatened by another form of collectivity:  the expanding prosperity of a capitalist economy that is seeking and developing modern vacation destinations.  Nebe’s paintings recall, in both imagery and format, Romantic landscapes, the landscape of Kiefer, from films and from Walt Disney.  He shows the tension that exists between the realm of the individual and the collective in relation to history and cultural history.  By utilizing different imageries, Nebe moves this tension from the Romantic to a tragicomedy.  (collectie G+W nederland)

34.

Louis De Cordier (1978, BE)
Blob (scale-model)
2008
Isomo, vubonite, putty
140 x 100 x 100 cm

'Man, and the artist too, rarely looks 150 years ahead', says De Cordier. The 'Blob' is a visionary project that conjures up an image of the future.  It is based on human measurements, history and dreams. Formally, the organic 'Blob' is inspired by the partition of nuts and seeds, as well as by the method of building ships, particularly the mythical Noah’s Ark with its assurance of the continuation of cultures. The 'Blob' is a vessel intended to sail on the warm Gulf Stream. This ± 10,000 kilometer long stream, a 'river' in the sea between North America and Spitsbergen, regulates the world's warm and cold currents, the basis of our climate and its changes. 'Blob' is a mental structure that embodies other worlds in itself, the same as an Ark. As such, the work injects the ‘bubble’ in which we live today with a different reality consisting of history and dreams.  (collectie G+W nederland)

35.

LA Raeven (1971, NL)
Love Knows Many Faces
2005
Video, 6’  loop
5/#1

Twins Liesbeth and Angelique Raeven use their own bodies and their relationship as twins as artistic tools.  They confront the viewer primarily with the norms that are often forced upon women in our consumerist society.  In the film ‘Love Knows Many Faces’, the sisters are involved in a heavy duel with each other, wherein they take turns trying to push the other under water.  Mimesis is irrevocably bound to the practice of art, and being a twin can also be read as a form of ‘mimesis’.  Through this association, the film expands from a strong, internal battle, to an image of art and history.  At the critical moment, when a drowning has almost occurred, the roles change in an almost fluid transition, from drowner to rescuer.  Each sister holds onto the body of the other, in an action that calls to mind a classical Pieta.  (collectie G+W nederland)