Ethel & Silviu Bãiaș | NEWS REPORT: CALAMITY
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Ethel & Silviu Bãiaș
NEWS REPORT: CALAMITY
4th of February – 28th of March 2015
Aiurart Contemporary Art Space | 21 Lirei St, Bucharest
Opening: Wednesday, the 4th of February, 7 – 10 pm.Ethel and Silviu Băiaș are part of a generation of established artists in 1970 in Romania, a couple of appreciated engravers and illustrators in a politically complicated period.
This exhibition aims to bring forth a highly consistent and strong artwork, two complementary discourses very well connected to the political, social and ecological past reality, but equally relevant, through recontextualization today.
The woodcuts focused on Calamities and Pollution of Atmosphere signed by Ethel Băiaș are mostly related to the toxic political environment and the gradual change of the social landscape under the influence of communist “pollution”. The Reports and Greenhouses by Silviu Băiaș complete the political and social picture with an authentic ecologic unrest. We are dealing with the prospect of an illustrator who, through a process of detachment, contemplates the degradation of the surrounding world captured in the pages of color-descriptive reports. The gestural force in the engravings of Ethel Băiaș is complemented by the scan of landscape type of perspectives or mapping, with color interventions specific to newspaper printing, a working manner common in the decades 60-80 from the XXth century in Polish poster and pop art.
An exhibition that brings out the powerful engravings made mostly during 1974-1988, a time of reconstruction, but also a time for rethinking an artistic work left for too long inside drawers. (Olivia Nițiș)