In Ion Grigorescu’s work, as in the book, the body is continually shown in different ways – from photography to film, from performance to drawing – and yet it remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one.
As it is impossible to show his art during the Communist regime, Grigorescu ends up hiding, disappearing inside the image. Instead of showing, the image conceals, because it is non-documentary and non-transmittable; it is an act of birth, a prove of the artist’s resistance, especially as a human being inside (or against) any geographical or historical background. In the rituals of his gestures and in the symbolism of his performances, Grigorescu finds a way to stay alive, preserving his own intellectual status while also defending the dignity of everyday life.
The book traces the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of his work, which inscribes itself into the space of the body and of the world. Grigorescu absorbs elements of the surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life: his act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough techniques to uncover the fiction of art, to denounce the artifice of representation and to affirm images as an instrument of subversive power.
Ion Grigorescu (Bucharest, 1945) is one of the most significant Romanian contemporary artists of the Post-War period and an iconic figure of the conceptual and performative art since the early 70s.
AVARIE is a Paris/Berlin based independent publisher founded in 2012 by curator Giuliana Prucca, specialized in experimental art books and exploring the relationship between texts and images, body and space.
Find more details on the publishers website.
