Ciprian Mureşan recontextualizes and deconstructs the works of well known literary and art historical figures. His practice displays a voracious appetite for metabolizing history, using the platform of art as a mode of critique and intervention. Mureşan’s approach to ideas is realized in a diverse spectrum of media that coalesce to form a cohesive view of the world that is sardonic, sometimes playful, and often darkly humorous.
Mureşan is part of a generation of artists who were adolescents at the time of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the ensuing political and social restructuring of Romania has profoundly impacted the way in which its artists question artistic production in a post-utopian era. Born in communist Romania in 1977, Mureşan was 12 during the Revolution of 1989, when the Eastern Bloc collapsed; he came of age in the ensuing period of “catch-up modernization,” which heralded Romania’s shaky transition to capitalism. His last two decades in Cluj, where he now lives and works, have fostered in him both a sense of disillusionment with his country’s institutionalized systems of misinformation and a healthy sense of irony. Critical and iconoclastic, Mureşan approaches the global canon of art and history with a light touch, making good-humored works whose commentaries are subtle and smart.
In a classically postmodern manner, Mureşan reinvents canonical literary, cinematic, and artistic works in order to demystify them, to destroy their auratic presence. Working conceptually in all media, Mureşan has produced his own versions of iconic works such as the play Rhinocéros by French-Romanian Eugène Ionesco, the famous photograph by Yves Klein entitled Leap into the Void, and the film Andrei Rublev by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Mureşan’s approach to replication, however, is distinctly different from classic appropriation art, and has more in common with the musical practice of remixing; while certain elements are recycled, the end-product has an uncanny, diffuse relationship to its source material.
Ciprian Mureşan (b. Dej, 1977) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Mureşan exhibited in the Romanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale and took part in the 17th Biennale of Sydney. His work has also been shown recently at the Vienna Secession, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Vitoria, the Witte de With in Rotterdam and the New Museum in New York.
