Nicodim Gallery is pleased to announce SAMPLE of European Contemporary Art by Teodor Graur, Teodor Graur's (born 1953, Pogaceaua/Mureş, Romania) first Stateside exhibition.
A passionate recycler of symbolic waste from Eastern European contemporary culture, Graur is currently experiencing a personal renaissance and emerging as an optimist. While his early work was a pointed, though humorous, critique of Socialist Romanian culture that later evolved into a satirical commentary of the country’s transitional form of capitalism, his recent output finds a practicality in the futility of it all, and delights in adding function to familiar forms. With SAMPLE of European Contemporary Art by Teodor Graur, the artist holds a warped mirror to the bounty and ethos represented by western pop art and reflects it through the filter of 20th and 21st century art history, as well as Eastern Europe’s tumultuous political past. Structures borrowed from Brancusi make excellent coatracks; Duchamp’s readymades are completed and made to be ready for practical use—in one work, Graur comically provides a rear-wheel to the original Bicycle Wheel, so the objects can be used in tandem for transportation. This is a show about the completion of incomplete ideals.
Graur has been active in the visual arts internationally since 1978. His work has been selected for inclusion in a number of international biennials including Venice (1997, 2001), Sao Paulo (1994), and Istanbul (1995). He won the Romanian Fine Arts Association Award in 2000 and 2006, and is a frequent contributor to the Romanian journals Arta and Artelier.