Ștefan Bertalan is considered an essential figure of the art scene in Timișoara, where he lived and died. In 1965, together with Roman Cotoșman and Constantin Flondor, he founded Group 111, the first experimental art group in communist Romania. Five years later he became a leading member of the Sigma group, which he founded with Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan, Elisei Rusu, Ion Gaita and Lucian Codreanu.

Diverse and hybrid, Bertalan’s work combines continuous research with a never-ending enquiry – like a logbook – into the nature of creation and humanity’s place in the universe. In its variations and metamorphoses, Bertalan’s art reflects a scientist aware of the laws of the universe.

The diversity of the disciplines and tools he uses, as well as the profoundly hybrid dimension of a practice that combines the most descriptive language with the invention of graphic and geometric schemes, in which abstraction and figuration are inseparable, testify to a remarkable original enquiry. This retrospective is intended to highlight this unique body of work. In addition, his passion for optics and mechanics, botany and geology, astronomy and all forms of systems, combine with a dogged desire to understand the world through observation.