Serban Savu
Golden Ages
2 MAY until 31 MAY 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm
For Gallery Weekend 2025, Galeria Plan B is pleased to present Serban Savu’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Unknown Gods, 2025
oil on canvas
153 x 195 cm
Courtesy the artist and Plan B Cluj, Berlin
Interested in the multiple meanings of visible reality, Savu paints the world around him as reflected through the lens of art history. Characterized by empathy and a keen sense of observation, his paintings employ synthesis and re-composition to invite viewers to reassess the present within a broader historical context.
His recent presentation, What Work Is, at the Venice Biennale 2024, explored the representational history of the laboring body, constructing a complex iconography of work and leisure. This project drew deeply from studies of historical realism and its ideologies, as well as the propaganda art of the Eastern Bloc.
For his upcoming solo exhibition, Golden Ages, Serban Savu continues his investigation of history and art history, revisiting and reinterpreting themes such as myths, ruins, and hunting. In a historical narrative where each epoch is built on the ruins of its predecessors, Savu reflects on how we relate to the past, inviting us to view the present as though it were already the past—a continuous sequence of construction and destruction.
Hunting Scene, 2024
oil on panel
70 x 56 cm
Courtesy the artist and Plan B Cluj, Berlin
“As an artist, I am interested in the present and in the time which I live in and which I want to talk about, but I cannot do it without looking back.”
Serban Savu
“I was always fascinated by suburbs in particular. I am not very interested in the center.”
Serban Savu
Neolithic Unearthings, 2024
oil on canvas 198 x 160 cm
framed 202 x 164 cm
Courtesy the artist and Plan B Cluj, Berlin
“Not unlike a Courbet mindset, in which classical tropes are applied as a filter through which to view the encroaching, democratized present, Savu’s paintings physically look and feel very old and very new at the same time. It’s post-impressionist, it’s post-classical, it’s post-Soviet — but it’s not Post-Modern. It ignores the visual markers of linear time and repositions both sociopolitical history and art history as feedback loops, as weavings in which the threads can no longer be unraveled — as reflections of the current moment marked both by hope and despair, inseparable still from the past that defines and confines it.“
Shana Nys Dambrot
Serban Savu was born 1978 in Sighisoara, Romania, and lives and works in Cluj.
Recent solo exhibitions include What Work Is, The Romanian National Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Giardini della Biennale, Venice (2024); Makeovers, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (2021); Serban Savu – Echinoctiu, Kunsthalle Bega, Timisoara (2020); Serban Savu – En dérive, Le Lait Centre D’art Contemporain, Albi (2019); Heroes, Saints and Other Figures, Plan B, Berlin (2018); Serban Savu, Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese, Rome (2018). Selected group exhibitions include: The Twist: Failing Empires, Triumphant Provinces, National Museum of Contemporary Art, MNAC Bucharest, Bucharest, (2024); Reenactment – Recostituire il passato, Galleria D’arte Accademia di Romania, Rome (2024); Remembering Peace, Kyiv Biennial, Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2023); Looking Anew and Beyond, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke (2023); Lost in the Moment That Follows, Ways of Collecting: Ovidiu Șandor Collection, Kunsthalle Prague, Prague (2023); The Influencing Machine, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2022); Art and The City 1974-2021, Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest (2021); Geta Bratescu, Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Muresan, Serban Savu, Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome (2019); Ciprian Muresan and Serban Savu, L’entretien infini, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018-2019); La Brique, the Brick, Caramida, La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse (2019); Ex-East, past and recent stories of the Romanian Avant- Garde, Espace Niemeyer, Paris (2019); Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining The Sublime, Hall Art Foundation, New York (2016); Appearance and Essence, Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara (2015); Tracing Shadows, PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Defaced, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado (2014); Romanian Scenes, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris (2013).