The long-awaited solo exhibition of the well-known artist will give him a welcome presence in Romania after many years of waiting. For more than two decades, Marius Bercea has developed a vast body of work in a variety of pictorial languages to depict the social and psychological aftermath of the regime change in Romania, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the effects of consumer capitalism in Romania.
His figures, landscapes and urban views show imprints of tectonic ideological shifts in Romania and across Eastern Europe. Bercea’s paintings have a keen sense of historical memory and, at the same time, are marked by the experience of the present in the context of democracy and the free market.
The title of the exhibition, This Side of Paradise, is borrowed from F.S Fitzgerald’s famous novel (1920), in which the author captured the essence of an American generation struggling to define itself in the aftermath of the First World War and the destruction of the ‘old order’. Fitzgerald managed to see through the glamour of a way of life to make incisive comments on its moral vacuity.
Marius Bercea has explored at length the complex and uncertain cultural realities facing his generation. The exhibition will present Bercea’s most recent studies of memory, loneliness and collective ordeal. His paintings emphasise the contemplative feeling of his subjects, who are as much involved in their personal affairs as in the collective anguish of a world crisis or pervasive globalisation. This perspective is of urgent importance in light of the latest global affairs.
