Marius Bercea & Avant Arte
New collaboration coming soon
“For me, painting is more connected with archaeology, because of its attributes: time, space, overlapping layers and pictorial material.”
Introspective paintings at the meeting point of East and West.
Marius Bercea creates impressionistic paintings that document everyday life before and after the fall of Communism. He layers thick oil impasto, thin washes of acrylic and layers of spray paint, generating hazy compositions with skewed perspectives that depict people immersed in a melange of urban, rural and domestic settings. The artist is considered part of the Cluj School of Painting, a movement from his hometown Cluj in the historic region of Transylvania. The mix of gothic and brutalist architecture in this area features heavily in Bercea’s practice, contrasted against emblems of capitali...
Marius Bercea creates impressionistic paintings that document everyday life before and after the fall of Communism. He layers thick oil impasto, thin washes of acrylic and layers of spray paint, generating hazy compositions with skewed perspectives that depict people immersed in a melange of urban, rural and domestic settings. The artist is considered part of the Cluj School of Painting, a movement from his hometown Cluj in the historic region of Transylvania. The mix of gothic and brutalist architecture in this area features heavily in Bercea’s practice, contrasted against emblems of capitalism like bright street signs and Californian palm trees.
Bercea draws from an “intensely personal archive” of family photographs, newspaper clippings, and artifacts that he has collected over his lifetime. Accordingly, his work reflects this lived history: the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union and the transition to free-market capitalism - which allowed him to travel and experience the hyper-consumerist reality of the West. Symbolic of the ex-Soviet experience at large, his work captures the seductive allure of Western capitalism alongside a nostalgia for communitarian and rural ways of living traditional to Eastern Europe. In lucid, cinematic tableaus, Bercea succinctly reveals the impact of major histories on everyday life via his own form of personal documentary.
Bio
Marius Bercea (he/him) was born in 1976 in Cluj, Romania, where he continues to live and work.
At Auction
His work has been held at auctions multiple times, with his painting Sundown selling at Christie’s in 2014 for $36,193 (USD).
Exhibitions
Bercea’s work has been exhibited at numerous international venues, including Francois Ghebaly Los Angeles, Blain|Southern London, Mie Lefever Gallery Belgium, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in the US, and the Turkish Eligiz Museum of Contemporary Art.
