For the first time in the Gulf, more than 50 paintings, sculptures and drawings by Ramniceanu will be brought into dialogue, providing an overall view of his atypical path and ever changing styles. The exhibition will bear witness to the importance of Ramniceanu’s work, in particular to his profoundly symbolic content and tireless questioning of the concepts of memory and identity, apparent in his work throughout his aesthetical researches and treatments.
The route offered is naturally structured by the artist’s key cycles: Centaurs, Memory of the Islands, Poetic of Geometry, Universal Man, Scholars, Pillars, Golden Nights. The exhibition will illustrate the itinerary of an artist who has made a powerful contribution to the language of contemporary art. Through the richness of the artworks displayed, the show will highlight the diversity of Ramniceanu’s oeuvre — between clean conceptual gesture and baroque profusion of colors and materials, between painting and sculpture — as well as the strict consistency — whatever the medium — in his exploration of human soul. Now recognized as part of his oeuvre in its own right, Ramniceanu’s sculpture is gradually becoming more and more monumental in scale as illustrated by the Builder, a brand‐new 7m sculpture of over one ton.
Born in Ploiești, Romania on August 15, 1954, Stefan Ramniceanu graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts Nicolae Grigorescu in Bucharest in 1979 in the context of the famous “generation of the ’80s” in Romania. After establishing himself as a fixture in Romanian contemporary painting with his landmark exhibition Ferecătura (Curtea Veche,1988), Ramniceanu decided to face up to the international artistic arena. Shortly after having taken part in the Romanian revolution in December 1989, Ramniceanu was invited by the French government and eventually established his studio in Paris in 1991.
First a fellow of the French government, he became a resident of the Cité Internationale des Arts in 1992 and was awarded the French citizenship in 1999. His works have been exhibited extensively in Europe — including in Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, France, Germany, Greece and Switzerland — and internationally and are now part of major public and private collection. In 2001, General Honorary Curator of the Louvre Museum and former Director of the Delacroix Museum Arlette Sérullaz wrote the preface to Ramniceanu’s first monography under the title Between Est and West, an alchemist which has survived through ages. For his grand comeback in Romania in 2014, the Brancovan Palaces Cultural Center devoted Ramniceanu an exceptional wide‐ranging retrospective under the title “Marks,” with over 400 artworks being displayed in parallel at the Mogoşoaia Palace and at ATELIERAMNICEANU.
The language of material plays an essential role in the work of Stefan Ramniceanu, most of whose pictures have a three dimensional structure. In a career spanning 35 years, his work has been developing in a process of accumulation, mingling and reworking of themes, motifs and symbols which recur and overlap repeatedly in diverse media. Highly symbolic connections emerge from metal, concrete, wire and other heterogeneous materials. Numerous pastose layers of muted colors lend the surface of his paintings a relief‐like structure and thus an almost sculptural plasticity. The artist has borrowed indeed vocabulary from the specifics of painting crossing the discipline of sculpture, where he now focuses his efforts.
Exhibition made in collaboration with H&H Mécénat and ATELIERAMNICEANU.
ARTISTIC DIALOGUE