The exhibition Essay on Space is the first public event initiated in collaboration with the newly established Horia Bernea Foundation, whose mission is to research and promote the artist's legacy. The exhibition brings to the public's attention a series of works, sketches, and documents belonging to the early stage of the artist's work, which was fundamental in shaping the conceptual directions and formal solutions that would later mark his entire oeuvre. Horia Bernea's experiments between 1968 and 1973 are astonishingly modern in terms of their investigation of the medium of painting: from experiments with pictorial matter – which in some cases led him to use various types of industrial pigments – to his insistent explorations that push painting toward objecthood. This period is also one in which he is gradually giving form to his reflections on the artistic act in programmatic texts, through which art is integrated into a broad field of concerns, with the simultaneous goal of expanding knowledge and deepening the mystery. The conceiving of a system of “entities” with invented morphologies and names – Brarb, Mucarfă, Verg, Stroaeuge – makes perceptible the artist’s way of weaving together references to the subatomic realm, the tangible reality, and the spiritual plane. Equally striking in this exhibition are the ways in which he moves from sketch and drawing to painting and object, reflecting a feverish creative process where rigor intersects with spontaneity, akin to the improvisational energy of jazz, a lifelong passion of Horia Bernea. One of his earliest studios, located on Șelari Street, is featured in the exhibition not only in a documentary and reconstructive sense but also as a means of unveiling the conceptual practices that shaped the artist’s methodology. The project as a whole, of which the exhibition is a part, is, in fact, centered on an important component of the artistic heritage that the Foundation will take care of: Horia Bernea's studio. Specifically, it is the studio he built and where he worked during the late period of his life and activity, in Otopeni. Rummaging through chests, boxes, canvases, and papers revealed an object inextricably linked to an important episode in Horia Bernea's early career, on which the exhibition focuses, namely his first participation in a major event in the art world of those years. In 1971, Bernea was invited to participate in the Paris Youth Biennale, where he exhibited the work Essay on Space / Iconography after Knowledge, for which he received one of the Biennale's awards. On that occasion, he exhibited a large-scale “wallpaper” composed of photocopies of a large number of drawings created between 1969 and 1971, on which he was figuring the “entities” that composed the iconography mentioned in the double title of the exhibition, a topic also insistently addressed in some of his early texts. Several smaller and more limited reconfigurations of this composition (assemblage, collage) were featured in a previous exhibition at the Salonul de proiecte [Situations and Concepts, 2018]. The surprise was to find now in the Otopeni studio a large-scale "wallpaper," and we wanted to share this discovery. We felt that sharing it publicly was the most striking and concise way to express how we relate to Horia Bernea's studio, and one of the ways in which we wish to reveal and display what it contains. The choice to make of this piece the focal point of our exhibition dictated the selection of the other works. As he was recollecting in an interview with Mihai Sârbulescu published in 2002, Horia Bernea had intended to hold an exhibition entitled Essay on Space in the immediate chronological proximity of the Paris event at Galeria Nouă, an important exhibition space in Bucharest during the first half of the 1970s (which had been curated by prominent members of the Union of Artists who were part of the editorial team of Arta magazine). Its closure by the authorities prevented the realization of this intention. It is a telling situation for the way history of artistic events – and of their public resonance – was being constructed in those years. The texts produced around the Paris exhibition, as well as the lasting artistic consequences of this project, did not remain unknown, but their circulation was more or less haphazard, resulting from initiatives that could not be coordinated, and this considerably diminished the impact they would certainly have had on Romanian art of those years. Revisiting this moment decades later allows us to look with fresh eyes at the works from that time and to reassess their significance in the context of Bernea’s oeuvre, as well as in the broader one of the art of the period. We invite you to join us in this attempt. The exhibition is organized by the Salonul de proiecte Association in collaboration with the Horia Bernea Foundation. The Foundation has undertaken the task of safeguarding Horia Bernea’s artistic legacy in a comprehensive manner, and proposes to consider the various aspects and implications of such an endeavor. Within this project, a number of works have been restored, some of which are presented in this exhibition, alongside the initiation of the digitization process of the artist’s documentary materials and archive, all housed in his studio in Otopeni. This October, a colloquium on 20th-century artists’ estates will be held in collaboration with the New Europe Foundation / NEC. Image: Fragment of a drawing notebook, 1969, Courtesy Horia Bernea Foundation Exhibition design: Atelier Ad Hoc, București Special thanks: Larisa Sitar, Matei Emanuel This event is organized by the Salonul de proiecte Association, as part of the project Horia Bernea’s Studio: Preservation and Promotion in the Context of 20th-Century Artistic Legacies. Cultural project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund

The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the results of the project can be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the grantee. Partners: Horia Bernea Foundation, New Europe Foundation / NEC, Department of Art History and Theory – UNArte Bucharest, Ivan Gallery Sponsor: Corcova Roy & Dâmboviceanu