Geta Brătescu's First US Museum Retrospective Showcases Decades of Romanian Art

Geta Brătescu's inaugural solo exhibition at a US museum presents a concise yet powerful retrospective spanning 1974 to 2000, featuring drawings, collages, videos, and sculptural installations across two rooms. The Romanian artist, now eighty-eight, created much of this work while living under Nicolae Ceausescu's communist regime from 1967 to 1989. Her 1990 series Memorie comprises forty collages with black and indigo tempera on paper strips, each bearing the handwritten word 'memorie', produced a year after Ceausescu's execution. The 1978 film Atelierul captures Brătescu performing in her Budapest studio, drawing on surfaces and interacting with tools, highlighting resourcefulness amid state-controlled rations. Another film, Mâini. Mâna trupului meu îmi reconstituie portretul (1977), shot by Ion Grigorescu, shows her hand performing gestures like tying a knot and tracing its outline, asserting artistic subjectivity. Hand imagery recurs throughout, including in Fals Joc de-a Fapta (1985), a vitrine with gesso casts of splayed hands alongside marbles and stones, and in the ink illustration Mâna (1974–6), where Brătescu notes the hand's vitality as a model. The large-scale installation Didona (2000) uses black felt and aluminium panels to homage the queen of Carthage, transforming domestic materials into art. Despite its limited scale, the exhibition offers an electrifying introduction to an artist long working in obscurity.