Author: ARTMargins

University of Fine Arts, Bucharest. June, 2001 

A successful exhibit of recent painting by Alexandru Radvan opened at the gallery of the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest at the end of last June. Radvan is an important player among those among young Romanian painters who have chosen figuration as a means of expression. Like them, Radvan has discovered, or rediscivered, the value of representation.

Radvan has organizes his dynamic compositions by means of a narrative thread. In this way he recovers universal myths (the Ghilgames saga, Ulysses’s fights in the war of Troy, or Arabian tales), giving them a … Read more

Considering all the drastic changes the face of Prague has endured during the last 10 years, the inside of Czech art institutions and galleries has actually seen very little transformation. Mass refurbishments continue to dominate the mise-en-scene of the city in a desperate attempt to catch up after the last 50 years of isolation, and although since 1989 Prague has quickly become one of the hottest tourist spots (“it’s just so cheap”) in all Europe, not everything sweeps easily under the rug.

Czechs, among other Post-Communists, were expected to immediately embrace the exact system they were taught to despise and … Read more

In Romania, the notion of privately funded cultural initiatives is still in its very early stages. Until only recently, wealthy members of Romanian society have been reluctant to contribute to the arts, and artists across all mediums have traditionally found it difficult to secure any degree of financial backing from the upper class. Three years ago, however, a wealthy marble manufacturer from Baia Mare was approached by an ambitious artist proposing the formation of a private museum for Romanian contemporary art. Together they created the Florean Museum, named after the wealthy marble magnate who sponsored its development. The foundation of … Read more

The development of Russian architecture, from the neo-classicism of the 1950s to the postmodern trends of the 1990s, followed socialist and post-socialist economic and political cycles. Soviet architecture was essentially an element in the socio-political process of the construction of communism. The ideological blueprint for Soviet architecture was introduced during the earliest years of the Soviet Union when what was important in architecture was architecture’s political content rather than its structural laws or those of its physical environment.

In the early socialist age, new models of living space were developed which the architects defined as spaces for the collective. In … Read more

In 1989, the same year that British artists were responding to Thatcherite Britain by organizing art shows in warehouses, their Polish counterparts were trying to come to terms with a newly emerging political and social order that influenced and reshaped the Polish art scene.

The year 1989 marked Poland’s great economic crisis and, subsequently, the dramatic political transformation that took place in its aftermath. This, however, had been eased by the success of the “solidarity” movement and eventually led to the first free parliamentary elections in Poland. The end of the Communist era and the formation of the first freely … Read more

Let me begin my essay by telling a short anecdote: “Once upon a time, somewhere close to the North Pole, one baby polar bear asked his mother:
-Mommy, are you sure that I am a real polar bear?
-Yes, she answered.
-And all our family members are real polar bears as well?
-Absolutely, said she. Your father, me, your grandmothers and grandfathers, and all our relatives are real polar bears. But why do you ask?
-You know, he said, I trust you, of course. But why then do I feel so terribly cold?”

I would like to use this simple … Read more