Europe

Ciprian Muresan

Forgotten Statues

2020

Ciprian Muresan, Forgotten Statues, 2020

Forgotten Statues, 2020 continues the artist’s reflections on power and the fragility of works of art. In this case, it’s no longer about sculptures which are no longer on display but rather those that are on permanent display, fixing the official narrative of art history. In Forgotten Statues, the artist reproduces from memory sculptures from the permanent exhibition of the Art Museum in Cluj. In this case, the seemingly redundant relationship between the original and the copy, which leaves little space for creativity (due to the distortions of memory), suggests the difficulty of overcoming inertia in a society that is not distant enough from its past.

While the Ceau?escu regime came to an abrupt halt in 1989, it does not seem to have represented a divide that separates the past from the present. The confusion of the past with the present is perpetuated both at the level of our daily life, of the urban reality that surrounds us, as well as at the level of the cultural heritage presented in museums or in the public space. Muresan’s work demonstrates how cultural heritage is presented only partially, in a censored manner, often moving within the confines of a comfort zone that avoids confronting the past.

Ciprian Muresan appropriates historical, political, social and cultural (essentially artistic, literary and cinematographic) references which he re-contextualizes. He analyzes the mechanisms de diffusion of culture, the ambivalent relations between the memory of recent history and the experience of current realities, as well as the relations between political power, religious power and civil society. With simple gestures, themes and methods borrowed from popular culture, he tackles art in an expiatory manner, returning importance to personal expression and experience. Ciprian Muresan belongs to the generation after the fall of the former Communist regime who deal the aftermath of political and social history of his country, in a post-conceptual mode, without necessarily inscribing it within the traditional East/West opposition. Instead, on the contrary, he approaches this history as an integral part of a larger whole, and is interested in questions linked to the disturbances in contemporary society following the declining of Modernist utopias and in the impact of new technologies on our visual culture. Ciprian Muresan was born in 1977 in Cluj, Romania. He lives and works in Cluj, Romania.

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Ciprian Muresan Forgotten Statues

Ciprian Muresan

Forgotten Statues