images | text

Geta Bratescu
Born in 1926 in Ploieşti, Romania / Lives in Bucharest, Romania

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): Tell me about your formation as an artist. What were your studies? And what was the art scene like in 1978, when you made the first series of Vestigii?

Geta Bratescu (GB): I have been an artist since I was born. I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me. I first exhibited my drawings when I was 17 years old, and after high school, in 1947, I became a student in Bucharest at the Fine Art Academy. Unfortunately, due to political reasons, I was forced out of the academy in 1949. In 1969 I had the opportunity to complete my studies, so I went back, and finished in 1972. In Romania, Bucharest especially, the art scene was quite conventional, and to be honest I wasn’t paying much attention to it. In the 1970s I did two experimental films with Ion Grigorescu and worked in different media: tapestry, drawing, collage, lithography, etching, photography, even performance. Every medium interested me except painting.

AP: What was the inspiration for Vestigii?

GB: I inherited from my mother a bag of old pieces of textiles from the seamstress who worked in our house when I was a child. The variety of colors and the warm softness fascinated me. There have been two Vestigii series, one in 1978 and one in 1982.

AP: The works you are showing in the Istanbul Biennial seem somehow between figuration and abstraction— bringing personal, everyday, common materials into abstraction.

GB: During communism in the 1960s, artists had to make “research” trips, meaning traveling to another place in Romania, usually for one or two months, and working in that particular environment or documenting the activities there. You were forced to do it, but you could choose the destination. My two different “researches” were in the Danube Delta and at Grivit¸ a Foundry in Bucharest. Grivit¸ a was for me deeply interesting, a mythical experience. The workshop of Hephaestus, where metal collides with fire. The immense circles of the foundry shape the space with a primordial authority. I realized that everything you put inside the circle becomes sacred, sanctified. It is taken by the force of the circle. Maybe it was then that this duality appeared in my mind, between the geometrical, industrial form on the one hand and the organic, natural form on the other. Later, in my artistic work, I assimilated this fact as a continuous stimulus.

AP: And in the series Vestigii from 1982?

GB: In 1982 I made a series of works starting from a bag full of different pieces of fabric waste. I drew a series of light-colored, delicate circles in tempera, and inside each of these sanctified spaces I placed a little piece of fabric, carefully selected for its color and shape. Just a piece of detritus, nothing more, but once inside the sanctuary space of the circle, it became a reality of the space, integrated in it, sanctified.