Berlin | ArtRegion: Schöneberg

GALERIA PLAN B

Ciprian Muresan

17. September – 9. Oktober 2021

Ciprian Muresan’s exhibition is a critical exploration into the collections that art institutions inherit
after radical shifts in the political systems or socio-political (even aesthetical) changes of
paradigms, when museum storages become repositories of “junk“. These collections-as-containers
could be the subject of TV shows such as Storage Wars, where participants have the possibility to
acquire the content of a storage unit without being able to check it beforehand.
In a museum, the mere accumulation of hundreds of works over the years develops a complex
institutional apparatus for maintenance, archiving and conservation, which often becomes
obsolete. For his solo exhibition at the S.M.A.K. Museum in Ghent in 2019, Muresan copied in
drawing the collection of the museum by overlapping the artworks so that they would fit on a sheet
of paper. The display of the drawings in Berlin is different than the one in Ghent, where a model of
the museum building resembling a carcass was used as a container for the drawings.
Muresan also reflects on the fate of monuments, their lack of utility nowadays, the loss of their
initial meaning over time, and their relevance for the present. In this exhibition, models for realised
projects such as The Spectre (2021), a large-scale sculpture exhibited at the National Museum of
Contemporary Art (MNAC) Bucharest in April this year, in which he tried to merge images of
prominent and frequently represented cultural figures, and the relationships of the sculptors with
these personalities, are displayed alongside models for sculptures yet to be realised. In Romania,
many monuments were used as occasions for futile celebrations, election campaigns, “markings of
territory“, among them: the statues of poet Mihai Eminescu by Gheorghe Anghel, and of playwright
I.L. Caragiale by Constantin Baraschi, both in Bucharest, as well as the statue of poet and
philosopher Lucian Blaga by Romul Ladea in Cluj. Muresan placed these monuments in a “mixer“,
in an attempt to re-purpose them and find new meanings, just as shards from broken porcelain
figurines are sometimes randomly recomposed and reflect the peculiarity of history through the
impossibilty of having visual closure or a “correct“ assembling of pieces in the puzzle.