ICONOFLUX brings together works by Horia Bernea, Eva Chapkin, Alexandru Chira, Ion Dumitriu, Florin Mitroi, Gili Mocanu, Anca Mureșan, Ciprian Mureșan, Diana Popuț, Șerban Savu, Mihai Sârbulescu, and Bogdan Vlăduță.
First presented this summer at the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, as part of Praxis! Emergent Curator’s Days, the exhibition has been reconfigured for the Arsmonitor space in Bucharest. The selection of works was rethought in relation to the gallery’s architecture and dimensions, while the list of artists remained unchanged.
ICONOFLUX stems from a series of inquiries into the way the iconic of a sacred nature circulates in contemporary Romanian art from the 1970s to the present. As a research-based curatorial project, the present exhibition is the first in a broader series, which does not aim to provide definitive answers and conclusions, but to make visible a wide spectrum of possible correspondences between generations, historical contexts, and different – sometimes divergent – artistic mediums.
Looking from the present toward the past, the micro-selection of artists highlights multifaceted typologies of the sacred-profane antinomy. In this retrospective inquiry, the theme under reflection traces the way in which what appears sacred transgresses the boundaries of art history and local historical circumstances, while what appears profane often retains references to the sacred iconic.
What was once an explicit symbol of the sacred may today be emptied of its original meaning, while other symbolic forms make indirect references to spirituality through technique, quotation, reference, or appropriation. ICONOFLUX traces precisely this flux of the iconic between the sacred and the profane, revealing the persistence of forms and formulas that transcend historical and generational circumstances.
