“What We Think about the Object Is Far More Important Than Its Making”: Some Notes on Horia Bernea’s Early Works

The text analyzes the early activity of the Romanian artist Horia Bernea (1938–2000), putting it in conjunction with various aspects of conceptual art. It emphasizes points of contact between Bernea’s practice and the existing narratives of conceptual art (including the Eastern European ones) and it provides contextual information about the artistic and socio-political environment in Romania during the period of liberalization which debuted at the end of the 1960s and lasted for a few years. The text mainly focuses on a close reading of some Bernea’s works which were made in this timeframe, namely the Production Charts series and his investigation of the “post-cognitive iconography” formed by a family of “Entities” with invented names and morphologies.

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