Translation: Emma Lingwood
The March 2010 edition of artpress (no. 365) featured an article titled ‘The Cluj School’ about the appearance of a new centre of contemporary art in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Prior to this Romanian art had only been known through expatriate artists or those living in the country’s capital. An interest in history, memory, and a rereading of avantgarde movements constituted, according to Marie Maertens, the article’s author, the specificity of this group of young artists working within an old brush factory, located on the outskirts of the city. The expression ‘The Cluj School’ coined at the time was appropriated by a part of the Cluj community, as a local mark of artistic excellence, even if the artists named in the article (Victor Man, Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Mureşan, Şerban Savu, Marius Bercea) never offered their opinion on it nor expressed reservations about this unifying formula.
THE ASCENSION Opened in late 2009 as a space for workshops and art galleries, the Brush Factory brought together in a kind of federation, visual artists, galleries and associations working in the sphere of the performative arts. It was the first time in Romania that an industrial space was converted into a cultural site. The latter gained international visibility thanks notably to the Plan B gallery, which had its headquarters on the site and where the artists mentioned above, with the exception of Marius Bercea, met. The gallery’s reputation was due in particular to one of its founders, painter Adrian Ghenie, whose work quickly attained staggering prices on the international market. Although the media made no explicit reference to a specific style associated with the Cluj School, they emphasized instead the key role played by the Brush Factory. Furthermore, references to the city as an artistic hub of contemporary international art were common. For example, the exhibition called Six Lines
of Flight, held in 2012 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, presented the city of Cluj and the Brush Factory as an emerging contemporary arts hub, alongside Beirut, Cali, Ho Chi Min City, San Francisco and Tangier, and the artists featured included Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man and Ciprian Mureşan. Cluj's reputation as a city of excellence in terms of contemporary art was reinforced in 2013 with the publication of Art
Cities of the Future: 21st-Century Avant
Gardes by Phaidon. With its title that fuelled local pride, the book placed the city of Cluj, with the artists from the Brush Factory, amongst the twelve international cities that deserved to be visited as places of 21st-century avant-garde art. The mere fact of being an artist in Cluj conferred an aura and many of its artists, such as Mircea Suciu, Radu Comşa, Cristian Rusu, Dan Beudean, Veres Szobolcs, Oana Fărcaş, Sergiu Toma, Mihuţ Boşcu Kafkin (we could list other names), enjoyed a remarkable international career. Romania’s artistic and political circles were surprised to witness this dramatic rise to notoriety of a group of artists of modest means and subsequently, generous public subsidies were poured into their projects. A series of exhibitions presenting the works of Cluj artists in prestigious venues in Europe and the United States culminated in the presentation of Victor Man’s works in the Central Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2015, and two years later, in the same pavilion, of Ciprian Mureşan’s work. The national recognition of the success of the ‘Cluj School’ was achieved, it can be said, by the decision of the Ministry of Culture to select Adrian Ghenie to represent Romania at the Venice Biennale of 2015.
THE SCHISM After this success had been achieved, a series of events occurred the following year that affected the image of the ‘collective entities’ of the Brush Factory and the Cluj School. In early 2016, invoking unfair practices, a group of gallerists and artists left the original organization and founded another federation.The galleries Baril, Bazis, Camera, Sabot and Spațiu Intact left the shared headquarters and established a new cultural space called the Centrul de Interes, in another abandoned industrial building, this time in the city centre. In the autumn of the same year, Cluj’s candidacy for the title of European cultural capital, highlighting the prestige of the Cluj School of Art, was rejected in favour of Timişoara, a city where the revolt against the Ceauşescu regime had broken out thirty years previously. Affected by the break-up, painter Şerban Savu spoke in an interview of the ‘Factory’s’ delicate balance despite the seemingly friendly relations between members. With or without relation to the events that had just unfolded, Şerban Savu’s exhibition that had opened the sum-
mer of the previous year in the small gallery White Cuib, in the centre of Cluj, displayed a striking change of visual register. Works like
Saint Francis and the Angel of Work introduced, not only in their title, a spiritual dimension to a painting whose characteristic had until then been the expression of the banality of everyday life.
PLAN B Plan B gallery is still present at the Brush Factory but two of its important artists, Şerban Savu and Ciprian Mureşan, have moved to studio spaces in the city centre. With a much more dynamic programme in Berlin— where a space was opened in 2008—than in Cluj, Plan B inaugurated an exhibition of Adrian Ghenie entitled Nightscape on 17 November 2017 in its space on the Pots
dammer Strasse, followed the next day by the inauguration of the exhibition The
Graces by the same artist, in the neighbouring Judin gallery. While the only ‘solo exhibition of Adrian Ghenie’ that was held in Cluj in 2006 revealed the artist’s emerging style, this dual public event confirmed a new stylistic direction, already visible in his exhibition at the Venice Biennale and in exhibitions at the other galleries that now show his work: Pace andThaddaeus Ropac.The title of the catalogue accompanying the Nightscape exhibition eloquently highlights this change:
Rememberment ofThings Past. Indeed, from a stylistic perspective the period of works such as Stalin’s Tomb or The Collector belongs to the past. References to the recent past and memory, deemed specific to the Cluj School in Marie Maertens’ article refer to a now obsolete period whose resonance only appears in titles like Berghof or Alpine
Retreat, allusions to places frequented by Hitler. A type of figurative painting with rather realistic representations has been replaced by a painting in which the detail has disappeared in favour of a broad, impasto touch, a demonstration of the artist’s skill, but with an almost abstract character. Moreover, the artist explained in an interview published in the Bucharest review Dilema Veche: ‘The moment when a painting approaches the figurative [...] is exactly the moment when a painting loses its interest. Therefore, I haven’t focused so much on 20th-century figurative painting but on abstract painting from the same century. I have tried to build a form of figurative painting using the bricks of abstract painting.’ The relationship with recent history, specific for some time to Plan B artists, has recently moved to the other side of the equation, that of its problematic creators. In 2018, at Art Basel, Plan B welcomed its visitors with the works of a Bucharest artist, Ion Bitzan (19281997), for whom an exhibition was organized in September-November of the same year, in the gallery’s Berlin space. If the initial works of Adrian Ghenie and Ciprian Mureşan contained a critique of oppressive societies (Ghenie highlighting for example the figures of Göring, Hitler or Stalin), Ion Bitzan could be associated with a gallery of figures symbolizing totalitarian regimes. Although the texts accompanying the exhibitions illuminated this aspect, Bitzan was nevertheless the best known of the portrait artists for Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu. And even if the works selected for these exhibitions came from an earlier, abstract period, the focus without a critical distance on a complicit artist who contributed to cementing the cult of Ceauşescu demonstrates that recent history continues to have surprising effects on the present. Călin Stegerean is a visual artist and cultural manager. Former director of the Cluj Museum of Art and then the National Art Museum of Bucharest. He is currently visiting professor at the National Art University of Bucharest.