View works | Press Release in Romanian
Estopia Art Gallery is pleased to invite you on Thursday, October 22nd, from 4.00 to 10.00 PM, at the opening of the exhibition Corporealities. Uncertain Bodies, by Ada Muntean.
In no other period in the past has the human body been so much exposed, explored and exploited than it is today. Never before has corporeality gained so much freedom – and this term literally seems to designate a new dimension, that of the autonomy and of the body’s own conquered reality.
Ada Muntean’s series of corporealities examine exactly this autonomous reality of bodies, perceived contextually – from the sensual to the sadomasochistic body, from the fashion body to the deformed one, from the reinterpreted historical portrait to the self-portrait, from the symbiotic body to the futuristic and perishable body.
The bodies represented in this series, says Ada Muntean, describe a familiar reality without delimiting it with certainty: from a series of possible typologies or human characters, the appearance of a culture or a society, to the confession of a personal history. The deliberately ambiguous identity shapes originate in the artist’s very intention to create a space of representation that accumulates as many valences and nuances as possible, while tolerating duality and opposites. Many times, the body is a face in Ada Muntean’s works, and often it is subject to metamorphosis and movement, always tempted to take new and new forms. But what do these bodily shapes say about us? The ambiguous and transitory identity facets visually suggest a disintegration, a dematerialization of the body – and ideologically personify the existential decadence.
“For me, Ada Muntean argues, the body represents the beginning and the end, the most important element in our physical life, which describes the palpable reality to which we refer. The human body is the cornerstone of my artistic exploration. I refer to it as a conceptual and expressive tool, meant to reveal the complexity of contemporary human existence in an immediate, intense and incisive way. The “keyboard” that the human body proposes for experimentation, in artistic terms, is from my point of view endless as resources and seductive as possibilities. The exploration of the body becomes the exploration of the self, and the exploration of the self becomes the exploration of the world. The artistic approach turns into a gesture with a strong existential load, and the examination of identity stances acquire the valences of a contemporary social and ontological analysis”.
Ada Muntean, Corporealities. Uncertain Bodies
October 22nd – November 21st, 2020
Opening: Thursday, October 22nd, from 4.00 to 10.00 PM
Estopia Art Gallery, Bucharest
Curator: Irina Ungureanu
Ada Muntean was born in 1987 in Cluj-Napoca, where she lives and works.
In 2009 she graduated from the Graphics Department of the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where she later earned her MA, in 2011, and her PhD Visual Arts, in 2019. She was a recipient of university scholarships at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, UK, and Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland. In 2015 she undertook an internship at Peckham Platform in London, and Plan B Gallery in Berlin, in 2016 Among her solo shows: Relativity, a duo show with Andreea Anghel, Nano Gallery, Cluj-Napoca; Blackout. [Follow The White Rabbit], NEW NOW Art Space, Frankfurt and Sabotage: Deconstructing The Unforeseen – Camera, Centrul de Interes, Cluj-Napoca, in 2018; Dot Fever. Future Memories, duo show with Mathias Bar, open studio, Cluj; Fluid Identity, FIVE PLUS Art Gallery, Vienna, in 2017. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and group projects, including Blurred Is the New ID, Estopia Art Gallery, Bucharest, in 2020; Woman, All Too Woman, Museum of Art, Timișoara, and Join the Dots, Imago Mundi, Salone degli Incanti, Trieste, Italy, in 2018; Process Terminus, Art Encounters, Timisoara; With | out Guidelines, Launloc Gallery, Cluj-Napoca and ARTOPIA, Vienna, in 2017; Open16, Peckham Platform, London; Resurrected, FIVE PLUS Art Gallery, Vienna; Learning & Unlearning – Înecați_Panta Rhei, Plan B Gallery, Cluj-Napoca in 2016 etc. In 2010 she exhibited in the photographic project Superbia, at the New Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.