Photo credit: Simona Runcan, Icon and Flowered Rug, 1998, oil on canvas, 36.81 x 36.81 inch framed, courtesy of the Estate of Simona Runcan and Ivan Gallery, Bucharest
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York is pleased to support the return of the Bucharest-based Ivan Gallery at the Independent, New York’s most experimental contemporary international art fair taking place in Tribeca from 9 to 12 May 2024. The Romanian gallery, one of the most international Romanian visual arts platforms, partners with the Ukrainian Voloshyn Gallery to jointly present two painters from different eras yet bound by a unique stylistic dialogue: the late Romanian artist Simona Runcan (1942-2007) and young Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska.
The show will present a selection of Runcan's works from the series “Interior, Icons, Inclinations” dating back to 1998-2003, which attests to her multivalent understanding of space. The compositional strangeness of these invented rooms, or sections of rooms, highlights a major conceptual source of her work: the thematization of the image itself. The artist's neo-avant-garde practice was marginalized within the state-controlled communist art system and has been posthumously rediscovered since 2016. Life alongside death is a recurring theme in Shahmuradova's recent works exhibited at the International, which were made against the backdrop of Russia's war in Ukraine, bringing forth human faces and bodies to dissolve and transform into new forms, laced with references to the paranormal.
About the Gallery
Ivan Gallery opened in 2007 with a program that make the works of Romanian and East European artists more available to a broader, international audience. The gallery’s portfolio includes established names like Geta Brătescu, Paul Neagu, Lia Perjovschi, Ion Grigorescu, as well as emergent artists like the duos Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu and Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Cristina David, Ștefan Sava or Iulia Toma. Ivan Gallery also represents Romanian artists living and working abroad, like Bartha Sandor or Mădălina Zaharia, alongside foreign artists, like Elijah Burgher, Ross Taylor, and Jaro Varga. The gallery’s other focus has been on documenting and exhibiting internationally the conceptualist and experimental practice of insufficiently known Romanian artists active in the second part of the 20th century, like Horia Bernea, Simona Runcan, and Florina Coulin.
About the Artist
Simona Runcan graduated in 1966 from the Graphic Arts Department of the Fine Arts Institute in Bucharest. Her works of graphic art, objects, paintings and installations explore in a processual, serial and cyclic manner various themes and working means, from the ‘60s-‘80s experimental, conceptualist graphics to the more tradition-oriented painterly approach embraced by her after 1990. Although she has exhibited in national and international solo and group shows, her practice remained overall little known or acknowledged, especially abroad. After she passed away somewhat prematurely in 2007, her works haven’t been exhibited until 2016, when her family together with a group of young art historians organised an extensive retrospective at the Mogoșoaia Cultural Centre near Bucharest, followed by a first solo show at Ivan Gallery in 2016, featuring her debut series of works, "The Presence of Objects", drawings and etchings on paper from 1969-72, and a second Ivan Gallery solo show in 2018 with paintings from the last part of career, "Silent Cohabitations". Between 2019-20 her works were included in the exhibitions curated by Salonul de proiecte in Bucharest, at Spike Berlin and at Cultuurcentrum Strombeek, Belgium (part of the Europalia Arts Festival Romania). Since 2021 Simona Runcan has been in the program of the Standard gallery from Oslo, with the solo show "Silent Cohabitations" (2021) and in the group exhibitions "Therein / Thereof / Thereto" (2021) and "Ir, Ir, Ir" (2023).
About the Art Fair
Independent New York was established in 2010, as a consciously scaled art fair focused on inspiring relevant art encounters for a well-informed and devoted Contemporary Art audience. Independent 20th Century premiered in 2022 to champion artists and international avant garde movements that took place between 1900-2000, in a historical setting (the Battery Maritime Building was built in 1908). Independent New York and Independent 20th Century together premiere internationally recognized artists, spotlight lesser known narratives, or feature a side of a canonical artist’s practice that even well-informed collectors and museums find worthy of further curatorial and market attention. There is not a traditional application process, as participation is invite only. Galleries and non profits are nominated by Independent founding curatorial advisor Matthew Higgs, in conversation with participating galleries and the Independent leadership team. Independent has a respected track record of delivering curatorial excellence and launching artists to a new level of artistic recognition. Both fairs are internationally appreciated as a place for discovery and consensus, essential attributes that are increasingly lacking in the art fair ecosystem. For artists, galleries, institutions and collectors, Independent remains the highest caliber, commercially viable creative platform for the art world’s future. We are the art world’s favorite fair in New York.
© Ruben Natal-San Miguel, courtesy of Independent, New York, NY