Zina Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming group show Crash, curated by Flaviu Rogojan and presenting works by Giulia Crețulescu, George Crîngașu, Thea Lazăr, Ioana Sisea and Ștefan Tănase. The opening will take place on Friday, May 20th at 6 PM.

For Ballard*, the car crash is a trigger to delve into a new world where the body achieves pleasure only when encased within the sheet metal shell of the automobile, where crashes open up new shapes and orifices, and where the erotic status of the car reflects on the 20th century’s relationship with technology. Half a century later, cars still hold their power in shaping society and urban development, and the impact of technology in shaping our bodies is only increasing. In the gallery, recent works by five emerging artists offer glimpses of an accelerating world and its visceral effects. From power relationships that twist up in glossy metal and shiny rubber to car organs that are delicately dissected, high-horsepower engines can rev up to question political status quos. In cleaner garages, polished car paint becomes a mirror to reflect status and access, while comfortably designed ergonomics guide the body’s violent drives.

*main character from J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, and later film adaptation by David Cronenberg.

Artists

Giulia Crețulescu (b. 1994, Craiova) graduated from the National University of Art Bucharest. While studying graphics, she became interested in the representational phenomenon as a dynamic between consciousness and action and in how the two-dimensional image communicates in a system of three-dimensional objects, forming referential circuits on the human body. Her interdisciplinary approach is embodied in hybrid objects that aim at the deconstruction of the object until the dissolution of its identity in a foreign body, deprived of any immediate function, thus becoming purely disruptive entities that force their placement under a new identity. The interest for the liminal, trans-categorical character of an object is powered by the desire to place the artistic object under an uncertain status that approaches and forces the viewer to come up with a series of possible ontologies in which they develop.

George Crîngașu (b.1988, Focșani) lives and works between Rome, Italy and Cluj, Romania. Crîngașu’s practice focuses on data manipulation, with works ranging from installation and video to print. His works, mainly digital collages and installations, utilize the informational flow strategies of the online environment to juxtapose images that create both tangible and immaterial realities. The artist also explores the new possibilities opened by digital materialities and cyber aesthetics in the medium of painting, combining different dimensionalities and following looser, monolithic compositions, uncharacteristic of the otherwise polished and elaborate digital images.

Thea Lazăr (b.1993, Tg. Mureș) lives and works in Cluj, Romania. She graduated from the University of Art and Design in Cluj and studied with a scholarship at the Academy of Art in Szczecin, Poland. Her practice is mainly digital but made to live offline, in installations that have come to include textiles and plants. Her works tell larger stories that investigate environmental and socio-political issues through local or personal tales. Aggregating different temporalities and blurred points of intersection between science and pseudoscience, her artistic practice draws on mythological stories and outer space imagery, producing new, present-day narratives. Since 2016 she’s been a member of the Aici Acolo collective – an artist-run project focused on promoting young and emerging artists by organising exhibitions in unused or abandoned spaces in Cluj-Napoca.

Ioana Sisea (b. 1988, Bucharest) lives and works between Bucharest and London. She has worked across varied media, such as video-performance, installations, ceramics and watercolour painting, but she is largely medium agnostic and adopts modes of expression that best suit the conceptual basis of each work. Her works explore contemporary issues such as social perceptions of the body, relationships, family and memory, using her personal experience and cultural background as a starting point. She often objectifies specific elements of a memory or interaction, removing them from their original context and the unchallenged prejudices that it may have permitted.

Ștefan Tănase (b.1996, Bucharest) is a multidisciplinary artist interested in topics ranging from the off-world to magic, experiments, rituals, networking, delivery, science, and what it’s like to live in the 21st century as a millennial migrant. Co-founder of GoodBuy Gallery, with a background in Graphics (the National University of Arts Bucharest) and Visual Communication (Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Besançon, France), Ștefan Tănase is currently studying Fine Arts at the Cantonal School of Art and Design of Lausanne (Ecal), in Switzerland, where he’s looking to decompose, scan and deliver different energy dynamics.