Grigorescu
is one of the most important Romanian artists. Since 1967, employing formats
like photography, video, and performance, he has addressed themes such
as sexuality, the body, labor, and politics, using time as a transformative
element. In addition, the category artist has been the object of the same
scrutiny as part of an auto-biographical process, which has led Grigorescu
to assume a dialectical role within the systems that govern reality. Grigorescu
has had individual shows in the JGM Gallerie in Paris (France), in the
Salzburger Kunstverein in Switzerland, and the National Museum of Contemporary
Art of Bucharest, among others. He participated in the latest Documenta
in Kassel, as well as in multiple group exhibitions in spaces such as
the National Gallery of Art of Warsaw, MUMOK, Vienna, or the GfZK, Leipzig.
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The work or the labour
Different works were represented in calendars during the Middle-Age, in
a rather didactic mood, but also with a undercurrent relation of the man
to time and universe.
In the Renaissance works are subject only for anatomical study of the
nude, and then to be transposed in apotheotic movements of celestial personages.
After the middle of the 19th Century the work is theme of the realism,
the ugly reality. It is ideologized as "the basis of the society",
of the value production, economic and change value. “The worker
is the master of the world!”. “The work elevates the man”.
Not without a certain hate for whom is not working (“the proprietors”).
The artists are as humiliated, flatterers by profession.
Now working is a kind of extreme sport or is hidden behind tools and engines
(“power tools”). For me, as artist, it is not mise-en-scene,
spectacle, or program. I am not in the worker’s role. It is not
dance. To whom it happens to work, he even lives this.
First is duty, something which must, and second is opus, reformatting
the man. How was the man before ? a only with mind worker, as also the
artist working only with his eyes and his hand.
Otherwise the artist can choose between labourer, farm hand, skilled worker.
Work, labour, toil. If Beuys pleads for turning to artist, I would better
go toward any kind of work, hard or easy, but not job.
-IG, 2008
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