Films by Ion Grigorescu – film screening on the occasion of the exhibition by Marieta Chirulescu

**Tuesday, October 26, 2010, 8pm **

Films by Ion Grigorescu

Film program:

  1. Und die Wahrheiten des Kapitalismus, 1977, 12’06“
  2. Colentina, undated, 2’31“
  3. Balta Alba, 1979, 7’50“
  4. Beloved Bucharest, 1977, 14’37“
  5. Vasile Alecsandri, 1979, 7’05“
  6. Toma at the Seaside, undatiert, 5’43“
  7. Fairy, 1978, 3’47”

With an introduction by Mihaela Chiriac.
The evening takes place in the presence of Marieta Chirulescu.

Since the end of the 1960s Bucharest born artist Ion Grigorescu (*1945) has explored themes such as sexuality, body, politics, religion and himself in relation to these topics through various media such as painting, photography, video, performance, installation and diary records. In his autobiographical work, Grigorescu implicitly questions his role as an artist, a role he already considers achieved in simple everyday gestures. Grigorescu’s film works with their precarious technical realization and the sparse, simple observations may seem anachronistic and self absorbed at first sight. But that’s exactly where their strength lays: the imperfect, raw technique depicts the deep, moving humanity of Grigorescu’s works.
After the disastrous earthquake, which massively destroyed Bucharest in 1977, state control was loosened and Ion Grigorescu was given the for communist Romania rare opportunity to travel abroad. On his trip through Zurich to Paris he captured with “avid camera eyes” the hectic life of the western contemporaries– a life so different from the one in Bucharest. These takes entitled Und die Wahrheiten des Kapitalismus (1977) will be presented along with a selection of other film works at STADTKINO Basel.
Ion Grigorescu’s use of documentary film material recording the condition of “bare life” was an important contribution to contemporary art in the 1970s and a paradigm-setting work for many artists in Romania and elsewhere. The work of Marieta Chirulescu, focusing on the ontology of image and copy, includes the newly printed, manipulated amateur photographs from the archive of the artist’s father that date back to the 60s and 70s.

Mihaela Chiriac (born in 1984, Brasov, Romania) studied Art History and Theatre- and Media Science at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen and is currently writing her PhD on the work of Ion Grigorescu.

Location: STADTKINO Basel (Klostergasse 5)
Admission: 12.-/For members of the Basler Kunstverein 6.-
With bar.