26.05.2020 – 09:17

Geta Br?tescu - L'art c'est un jeu sérieux, 9 June - 15 November 2020

The Kunstmuseum St. Gallen is the first Swiss museum to dedicate a retrospective to Geta Br?tescu (1926-2018). The title comes from a quotation by the artist: "L'art c'est un jeu sérieux."

With her oeuvre she engaged with the crucial theoretical and formal debates of her time and thus became a central artist between modernism and contemporary art. She is one of the most important Romanian artists of the 20th century and represented her country at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

The spatial and ideological separation between East and West shaped her life and thus also her art. During the repression under communism, Br?tescu's small Bucharest studio, where she worked until her death, was a place of freedom. The exploration of the self in her studio has already been highlighted as an important aspect in several exhibitions.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen focuses on the aspects of photography, film, and performance in her work, which have so far received little attention. Here the artist shows particularly close connections to the international avant-garde. In addition to collaged works on paper, performances captured in photography and film, as well as representative series of self-portraits, the exhibition also features large-scale installations made of fragile materials. The focus is on works from the 1970s and 1980s that show formal similarities to central positions of Postminimal art.

As a pioneer of contemporary art, Geta Br?tescu inspired the St. Gallen designer Albert Kriemler to create his celebrated spring/summer 2019 collection for Akris. The Geta Br?tescu exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen was realized in close cooperation with Kunstforeningen GL STRAND in Copenhagen, Ivan Gallery in Bucharest, and Hauser & Wirth, and will subsequently be shown in Copenhagen.

Press contact: kommunikation@kunstmuseumsg.ch

Gloria Weiss 
Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Head of Communications, T +41 71 242 06 84

Sophie Lichtenstern
Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Communications, T +41 71 242 06 85