The non-profit organization Zuecca Projects and the European ArtEast Foundation are proud to present   Estranged from Nature , solo exhibition by Ioan Sbârciu , one of the most important figures of the Romanian contemporary art scene.

The exhibition, curated by Maria Rus Bojan , international curator based in Amsterdam, and Alessandro Possati , director of Zuecca Projects, is organized in partnership with MB Art Agency, Amsterdam and Sector 1 Gallery, Bucharest, and will be hosted at Squero Castello of Venice, from 16 April to 14 July 2024 .

Conceived as a response to the theme "Foreigners Everywhere" of the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2024, the retrospective offers a cross-section of the visionary work and broad pictorial scenarios of Ioan Sbârciu, addressing the themes of alienation, loss and resilience.

Bringing together the artist's most ambitious works to date, Estranged from Nature presents a coherent overview of the recurring themes in Sbârciu's work since the 1980s, inviting us to reflect on the multiple forms of alienation that characterize the complexity of our times.

Neither figurative nor completely abstract, Sbârciu's monumental landscapes confront almost everything that weighs on our present: the fate of the Earth, the approach of a calamity and the urgency of redefining our relationship with nature. Mystery and matter manifest themselves in a rush of poetic illumination, in an explosion of color that masterfully spreads across the vast surface of the canvas.

Ioan Sbârciu has traced a unique path in the history of Romanian art, thanks to his particular ability to orchestrate painting as if in a continuous field of forces and energies, distributed over immense surfaces and complex chromatic networks. In three interconnected series of paintings - Cinder Forest, Transylvanian Lights and Infinite Landscape - the artist imagines poetic spaces as real as they are imaginary, saturated with mystical beauty and yet charged with the emotional dimension of a melancholy past. A glimmer of memory and hope is recreated on the canvas through performative rituals that invoke the redemptive nature of art.

Beyond neo-romantic gestural expressionism, the artist creates works that become physical topographies in their own right, made with tactile material elements, including ash and earth. The result of an immediate experience, these paintings are redemptive; they attempt to restore a lost past and a bucolic land, but above all they underline the infinite power of matter to be reborn in new forms, beyond the rational and the known.

EXTRANGED FROM NATURE

16 April – 14 July 2024

Wednesday-Sunday, from 11am to 6pm. Free access

VIP/Press preview: 16 April, h. 14-16

Opening: April 16th, h. 16-18

Squero Castello – Salizada Streta 368, Venice