Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Charlottenburg

Crone Berlin

Robert Muntean: The Ecstatic Static

25. Juni – 20. August 2021

In Muntean’s new exhibition The Ecstatic Static, the figures themselves now come to the fore for the first time. They become the defining, immediately recognizable element of the paintings. The abstract, gestural painting style is still visible, but now serves to outline the figures of the bodies and bring them to the fore. Their posture – their being bent, their standing upright, their squirming – becomes the essential means of expression in which emotion, fear, hope, confidence, or doubt are reflected.

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The exhibition focuses on several series that formulate and define the artist’s new concern with understanding and using the body and the figure as a metaphor for inner states in a multilayered way. In addition to the series The Ecstatic Static series, which gives the exhibition its title, this is especially so with the Two Lovers series.

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The scenario of Two Lovers is a standard existential situation, or at least a horizon of longing to which people’s libidinous energies are directed like iron filings. Whether the two lovers symbolize fulfilled happiness in life or serve as a cipher for a situation experienced as unsatisfactory is irrelevant. They represent a constantly fluctuating center of energy around which many other things – economy, politics, intrigue, death – circulate. Only in the gravitational field of mutual attraction is it charged with that force that can lead to constructive or devastating action.