Geta Brătescu

Art is a serious game Geta Brătescu is considered the grande dame of conceptual art in Romania. The 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 introduced her to a wider audience; art magazine BLUE featured her in detail in their December/January issue 2015/16. This comprehensive catalog is published on the occasion of the retrospective organized by the Hamburger Kunsthalle celebrating her 90th birthday, featuring important key works and work series spanning more than six decades. It is the first museum retrospective by the artist outside of her home country. Memory and history, historical deposition and organic growth processes, conformity and deviation, self-questioning and -assertion are among the issues that Geta Brătescu has repeatedly worked with and scrutinized in the course of her long artistic career. The work of this Bucharest artist is extremely diverse and varied in style. Geta Brătescu’s work is abstract and at other times representational, fragmented as well as three dimensional, and she makes use of different media such as drawing, photography, film, textile work and sculpture. She sees herself primarily as a draftsman in the service of the line, and describes her colorful paper collages as »drawing with scissors«, and her textile works as »drawing with the sewing machine«. At the same time, in her abstract work series the »Cut Outs«, the artist's interest is directed at the relation between line and surface, whereby she elaborates on this relationship in seemingly endless sequences and modulations. Fascinated by literature and philosophy and in a well-informed manner, she has devoted herself to the great figures of world literature such as Medea, Dido and Faust. For many decades, Geta Brătescu has been responsible for the graphic design of the magazine Secolul 20 (today Secolul 21), the main cultural and intellectual publication in Romania, which she still remains loyal to. Exhibition: Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 30/4–7/8/2016