View works | Press Release in Romanian | Press Release in English
Estopia Art Gallery brings fresh news at the beginning of September: after opening our gallery space no. 2 in Lugano, Switzerland, on September 12th, Estopia Bucharest is pleased to invite you at the first exhibition of the new season on Tuesday, September 24th, at 7.00 PM: Moonlighting, by Teodora Bogdan!
40 works on the same format of 30 x 30 cm, which concentrate a whole world in a single detail of anatomy – legs, and a unique accessory – shoes. Seen in a sequence, the series of works called Moonlighting, authored by Teodora Bogdan, seem to unfold scenes from a fashion show, where the faces of the female protagonists remain hidden: pairs of legs in motion appear in front of the viewer, who is thusly invited to recompose from such fragments the mysterious identity of these women wearing extremely extravagant shoes, almost acrobatic in certain works. In English, the term moonlighting refers to working at an additional job, after one’s regular employment, as at night, literally occurring “by moonlight”: the protagonists of Teodora Bogdan’s works are, therefore, as it becomes obvious from their provocative shoe wear, prostitutes. A highly original approach, that of the young artist from Cluj, who, by reducing everything to one detail – the leg – and the same type of footwear, aims to draw the attention on the phenomenon of prostitution as drama of the deepest human depersonalisation. Mimi, Mina, Mindy, Candy, Sally and Lola: they are all, in fact, the missing faces of the same terrible reality – that of a faceless femininity, which offers herself, a living merchandise in a shop window.
“After several attempts and compositional sketches – says the artist – the representation of the woman body starting from the lower leg, on a square format, convenient in terms of dimension, seemed to me the best option to accurately depict the typology of characters in this series: they are, in fact, by all means, convenient”. Exactly this attribute of being convenient is what gives them an air of tragedy, and recalls the famous pornai in ancient Greece – the lowest category of prostitutes, who approached clients on the streets, and whose job, to quote Pascal Bruckner, “was assimilated to that of mere bodies, who move in a play especially written by clients, who must stifle their fantasy and desires, apart from those that are required from them…”. An unsettling representation of a faceless, convenient world, in the exhibition Moonlighting, by Teodora Bogdan.
Teodora Bogdan was born in 1994 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she lives and works.
She studied Painting at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where she earned her BA in 2016 and MA in 2018. She is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at the same university. She participated in numerous group shows, among which Refresh Painting Research, Cluj-Napoca, in 2019; Vizualia, Cluj, and ArtFest, Alba-Iulia, in 2018; Breaking Rules, Museum of Art, Cluj-Napoca, and Give Me the Future, in the homonymous charity gala, Cluj, in 2017.
Teodora Bogdan, Moonlighting
September 24th – November 1st, 2019
Estopia Art Gallery, Bucharest
Opening: Tuesday, September 24th, 7.00 PM
Curator: Irina Ungureanu