2015 | Turning Something Plain into a Circle, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest

Turning Something Plain into a Circle
30 June – 5 September 2015

“Turning Something Plain into a Circle” is Raluca Popa’s first solo show, presenting new, site-specific installations made of personal history items, revisited in this context through the means of her artistic practice. Raluca Popa works drawing, photography, video and animation in projects that render volume and time to static, 2D media, such as etching and drawing.

Her present approach diverts the meaning and status of past exercises through simple gestures that revert perception and generate unexpected perspectives. The artist connects in time and space anachronistic fragments through an intimate self-reflexive process: a 1998 self-portrait, a 2001 monotype, the tree from her 2015 studio’s window. Popa appropriates her own works, questioning the general criteria for artistic selection through her decision to resume and show apparently insignificant, clumsy attempts, that are at the same time relevant for her artistic “training”. She chooses to make visible the traces, the remains, the clues of some inexistent or absent projects, through a counter studio practice that conveys the thine line between original and projection, aim and outcome.
Photo credits: Ivan Gallery, Bucharest

List of Works:

Edition 1+1 (Two copper plates), 2015
drawing on copper

Self portrait,
charcoal, 50 x 70 cm, dimensions variable
1998/2015

Calendar
coloured pencil, marker on paper
2013

Turning Something Plane into a Circle
monotype
2001/2015

Fusion
video projection, 50 sec, loop, b/w
2015