IOMO Gallery announces the opening of Mircea Roman's solo exhibition on September 11 at 6 PM. Curated by Horațiu Lipot, it is entitled "Lupta schimbă gustul cărnii" (The fighting changes the taste of meat) and can be visited until October 11, 2025. “Wood sculpture, which we can argue represents the metabolism of Romanian sculpture after the postwar period, is configured, broadly speaking, through two approaches: the archaic carving and the modernist assemblage. In relation to the sculptural object, Mircea Roman uses wood in a manner closer to assemblage than to traditional carving. The artist fragments volumes extracted from massive pieces of wood, generally softwood like poplar, linden, willow, shaping them, only to later reassemble them through visible mechanical fastenings – nails, staples, clamps, glue – often around the joints of his silhouettes. Roman names this method „tehnica aceasta cu bucăți” (“this technique with pieces”). The volumes do not derive from a compact block, but are constituted through the juxtaposition and articulation of distinct segments. Beyond the processual approach, wood, this archaic everyday material, induces an archetypal aura. It is precisely this tension, between process and representation, that transgresses and marks the entirety of the sculptor’s oeuvre. In order not to squander that which has the force to extract, through contrast, what is essential, his new solo exhibition aims to articulate this dualism through a corpus of recent works: on the one hand, through large-scale works with iconic charge, such as “Jacob’s Fight with the Angel”; and on the other hand, through more recent pieces from his research into the morphology of materials, which, although at first sight seem devoid of figurative traits, nonetheless carry the latent aura of a character (​​“Trophies”).” – Horațiu Lipot Mircea Roman (b. 1958, Băiuț, Maramureș) is one of the distinct voices of contemporary Romanian sculpture. A graduate of the “Ion Andreescu” Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca (1984), Roman established himself in the 1990s on the international art scene, winning the Grand Prize at the Osaka Triennale of Sculpture (1992). He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and was awarded a residency at Delfina Studio in London. His compositions, recognizable through their figurative expressiveness and the force of volumes, maintain a constant tension between fragility and the monumental. His works are included in major public collections, such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest and the Osaka Contemporary Art and Culture Center. He lives and works in Bucharest.