Ioana Gorzo and Dumitru Gorzo at Arsmonitor

Artists: Ioana Gorzo and Dumitru Gorzo

Exhibition title: TWO GORZO

Venue: Arsmonitor, Bucharest, Romania

Date: February 29 – April 18, 2024

Photography: IONUȚ DOBRE / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Arsmonitor, Bucharest

The TWO GORZO Exhibition, a duo-show featuring Ioana Gorzo and Dumitru Gorzo, brings forth a unique dialogue between two seemingly opposing artistic forms. The drawings and paintings of the two communicate and complement each other in a less explored territory when it comes to art, radically addressing issues of imagery, with meanings of representation and the phenomenon of the iconic. Despite appearances, the art of the two aligns on the same side of anti-representation.

The TWO GORZO Exhibition initiates a discussion about drawing and painting that challenges the conventions of art history, bringing things closer to a matter of visual studies, as a fundamental interest in contemporary culture. This alternative perspective on art is often obscured by a retro-modernist understanding of painting as a superior technical form of craftsmanship.

In this sense, painting, nostalgically regarded as the “queen of the arts,” appreciated through a series of 20th-century stereotypes such as figurative vs. non-figurative, realistic or abstract, is here questioned in a concrete sense, as a secondary and material support for an immaterial phenomenon – the image.

Simultaneously, the “painter’s” personality, still perceived through the traditional manifestation of individuality, through the lineage of mastery, and through generational belonging — as Dumitru Gorzo is exclusively appreciated as one of the “most important” or, on the contrary, as the most controversial of a questionable 2000s generation — this time subjectivity is questioned, diluted, and nullified under the auspices of collaboration and dialogue with Ioana Gorzo.

In the case of this duo, in particular, techniques and subjectivity are a “support” and instrument, and the exhibition’s proposal is to reflect precisely on this aspect from two seemingly opposing perspectives that come together on the anti-representation realm. On the one hand, for Ioana Gorzo, the image is a cold and objective study, with the represented subject being canceled and replaced by multiple degradations obtained through a non-objective approach. On the other hand, for Dumitru Gorzo, the image is a hot topic, where free form and contour are canceled by materiality and mineral layers through a series of additions. In one case, the image is the trace preserved through a series of eliminations; in the other, it is an accident and surplus.