EUROPALIA - PERSPECTIVES

(2 Oct 2019 - 2 Feb 2020)

Romania was the guest of honor of EUROPALIA International Arts Festival in Belgium at the 27th edition. The opening took place on October 1, 2019, at the Palace of Fine Arts - BOZAR, in Brussels, in the presence of Their Majesties King Philippe of Belgium and Queen Mathilde, the President of Romania and many officials and personalities.

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The program of the Europalia Romania Festival, coordinated by the Romanian Cultural Institute, included over 250 events about Romanian culture and civilization explored via visual arts, music, cinema, literature, performing arts or theater.

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The event hosted 27 exhibitions, 5 of which were dedicated to the promotion of young Romanian artists. The themes approached the Romanian culture and civilization from the prehistoric to present times. The National History Museum of Romania coordinated two exhibitions that presented the common history of Europe; through the Perspectives exhibition, curators Wim Waelput and Igor Mocanu brought to the public's attention a series of perspectives on Romanian Modern and Contemporary Art, while record label ELECTRECORD presented, in a unique project, the history of pop music culture in Romania, during Communism. The festival also featured important contemporary art projects: the Cinema exhibition, dedicated to Ion Grigorescu, one of the main representatives of the neo-avant-garde, Ciprian Mureșan exhibition, on the occasion of the S.M.A.K. Museum. from Ghent, Displacement and Togetherness, an exhibition on the migration of artists from Romania to the Occident during Communism or Rethinking the Image of the World. Projects and Sketches, a view on the artistic evolution in Romania of the last decade.

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The focus of the BOZAR festival was the premiere of the Brâncuşi exhibition. The sublimation of form, the most extensive and impressive retrospective of the last 25 years, about Constantin Brâncuși's international career and his invaluable contribution to the emergence of Modern and Contemporary Art. With over 1,500 square meters dedicated to Brâncuși's art, the unprecedented exhibition curated by Doina Lemny, museographer-researcher at the National Museum of Modern Art, Center Pompidou in Paris, presented the universality of Brâncuși's work, bringing together over 25 sculptures and another 250 objects, photographs and documents from the world's top museums such as the Tate Gallery in London, the Rodin Museum and Center Pompidou in France, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as artworks from the National Art Museum of Romania, the Art Museum in Craiova or from the collection of the Romanian Academy and even Brâncuşi's record collection. Adjacent to the exhibition, Romanian and Belgian artists presented a series of performative events in addition to the visual discourse of the exhibition.

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The largest section was dedicated to Brâncuși's studio and the atmosphere in which he developed as an artist and created in Paris. To recreate the atmosphere of the Parisian avant-garde that gathered in his studio, representative pieces belonging to Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Man Ray or Amedeo Modigliani, were also exhibited , as well as artworks by Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese-American artist who spent several months in Brâncuși's studio.

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The exhibition gathered top works from museum or private collections, such as The Sleeping Muse, The Kiss or Leda, along with works by Duchamp, Medardo Rosso and Rodin.

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The sublimation of form, the largest retrospective in the past 25 years dedicated to Brâncuși, was visited by almost 120,000 people, between October 1, 2019 - February 2, 2020.