Published 5 NOV 2025
Cornel Brudascu
8 NOV until 25 JAN 2025
Galeria Plan B is delighted to announce Cornel Brudascu’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a selection of his most recent paintings and drawings. The following text by Kristian Vistrup Madsen is an excerpt from the upcoming monograph on Cornel Brudascu.
Cornel Brudascu,
Untitled, 2024,
oil on canvas,
45 x 50 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Plan B Cluj, Berlin
“Brudascu’s princes are the ordinary boys one sees waiting for the bus, or crossing the street; or, interchangeably, porn actors as they appear fleeting across screens, evacuated from the image machine. Like Edgar Degas’s dancers, their power is also their vulnerability, though unlike those stick women in their disk-like tutus, the Brudascu ballerinos appear undressed of connotation, floating free of language, miraculously unfazed by the beauty and the youth they stand to lose. Quite simply blessed by what is, they are not here to remind us of death – or, as in Degas, artifice, the shallow water of gracefulness – and in this, their beauty belongs to a special category within art. Where the ancient beautiful boy remained young by dying young, Brudascu’s man of the wings will always be young because he is fragment and figment; the picture of a pure and perfect presentism, which, as all things pure and perfect, is necessarily also partial.“
Kristian Vistrup Madsen
Cornel Brudascu, born 1937 in Tusa, Romania, lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. He studied at the Institute of Arts Ion Andreescu in Cluj, graduating in 1962.
Selected institutional exhibitions include: Mirrors of the Portrait, Highlights of the Centre Pompidou Collection, Vol. III, West Bund Museum, Shanghai (2023); Looking Anew and Beyond, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke (2023); Stefan Bertalan, Cornel Brudascu, Mircea Spataru, Muzeul National de Arta al Moldovei, Chisinau (2023-2024); Avangarda si Contemporaneitate, Muzeul Judetean de Arta, Centrul Artistic, Baia Mare (2023); De leur temps (7), FRAC Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, Dunkirk (2023); YOU FEEL – AND DRIFT – AND SING, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (2021); Secret Wing, Art Encounters Biennale, Timisoara (2021); Collection display, Musée d’art moderne, Paris (2020); HABITER L’INTIME, Fondation Thalie, Brussels (2019); Flesh and Bone, PS120, Berlin (2019); Ex-East, past and recent stories of the Romanian Avant-Garde, Espace Niemeyer, Paris (2019); Une saison roumaine au Centre Pompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Life – A User’s Manual, Art Encounters Biennale, Timisoara (2017); The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London (2015); Burning Down the House, 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014); East of Eden – Photorealism: Versions of Reality, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest (2011); Romanian Cultural Resolution, Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig (2010); The Museum of Painting, The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (2005).