Exhibition view, Ciprian Muresan, Galeria Plan B, Berlin, 2021

Ciprian Muresan, Galeria Plan B

The conceptual practice of Ciprian Muresan explores the relation between art and social history in drawings and sculptures that act as a plural questioning of the notions of value and authorship. Over the last years Ciprian Muresan’s work has been revolving around the idea of reconstructing and deconstructing, erasing and rewriting iconic symbols of the Western visual culture. This visual reservoir acts as an enormous accumulation of historical layers and images that the artist takes as raw material for his personal reading.

Muresan’s multifaceted oeuvre continually questions prevailing power structures, whether it be in the form of political reflection, poetic translations or artistic counter-manoeuvers. It examines how power affects the processes that shape communities, such as cultural creation, history writing and the formation of identity. Although the Romanian background and history are often the starting point, his work does not express simplistic contrasts between East and West. It offers a reflection of a globalised world and its widely disseminated faith in entertainment and consumption, which transcends all ideologies.

Exhibition view, Plague Column 2#, 2016, Tate Modern Collection Display, London, 2021

Exhibition view, The Spectre, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest, 2021

Never employed as an instrument of direct notation, drawing functions for Muresan in equations that unfold this mode of production in an ampler reflection, to do with visibility and loss, historical suspension, and forms in which the past is retrieved or confabulated. A growing strand in Muresan’s output is constituted by labor-intensive copying exercises. Superposing for instance on a single sheet all the reproductions from an art publication, the drawings gesture in divergent directions: an almost devout relation to the great masters, but also the invention of an opaque space of overlayered images, where past-present equations become warped and dissonant.

Exhibition view, Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017

Ciprian Muresan, born 1977 in Dej, Romania, lives and works in Cluj, Romania.

Solo exhibitions include: The Spectre, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (2021); Ciprian Muresan, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2021); Ciprian Muresan, S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent (2019); Art Club 22: Ciprian Muresan, Villa Medici, Rome (2018); Your survival is guaranteed by treaty, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2015); Recycled Playground, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2013); Tate Modern, London (2012, with Anna Molska); Contemporary Art Center, Geneva (2012); FRAC Chapagne-Ardenne, Reims (2011); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2010).

Group exhibitions include: ‘Colliding Epistemes’, BOZAR, Brussels (2022); A Biography of Daphne, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2021); Beating around the bush # 6: Scenes from the Anthropocene, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2020); An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong (2019); How We Live, Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill New York (2019); Ciprian Muresan and Serban Savu, L’entretien infini, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); The World on Paper, Deutsche Bank Collection, Berlin (2018); Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Drawing Biennial, Drawing Room, London (2015); Allegory of the Cave Painting, Extracity Kunsthalle, Museum Middelheim, Antwerp (2014); Analogital, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2013); Six Lines of Flight, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), San Francisco (2012); Promises From the Past, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); The Seductiveness of the Interval, the Romanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009).