Marieta Chirulescu

On the surface of it Marieta Chirulescu is a materialist. The inkjet-printed images she incorporates into her paintings are not used to open windows onto other planes, other places; nor does she have any truck with the post-internet idealism of her contemporaries, although she emerged as an artist in the late 2000s when the ink-jet technique was seen as a state-of-the-art panacea, capable of rendering painting newly relevant for the digital age. Now that the promise of that technology has been superseded by that of more up-to-date methods of generating images, the extent to which the digital component of her work is assimilated by the painting and fabric collage with which it is combined is less likely to be obscured by the glamour of the printing technique in its own right. What is what in the mix has always been difficult to unpick. Images are arranged as bricolage; the bricolage of fabric collage creates images. Photography is used to produce monochrome painting; monochrome painting to occlude photographic illusionism. A pinstriped shirt fabric, sliced up finely, becomes drawing, liberated from the manual trace which could be inferred from a pencilled line. When such fabric is scanned, its pattern printed onto canvas, there is a humorous relish of the tautology of turning fabric (canvas) into an image of fabric, and having clothing ‘clothe’ a painting. Even nascent signs – Ds or dashes – assume a structural role as lesions cut into fabric, exposing another surface beneath it as part of the same surface. If is it hard to tell what is there from what is pictured as being there, the distinction resolves, in all instances, into the materiality of a surface. But these are not recipe paintings. Rather than leaving us to parse and enumerate their constituent elements, at the last moment they abstract themselves. The tendency of materials and media to relinquish their individuality in the interests of the whole is a means to this end. The unusually thin canvas is also a clue, in combining the fulcrum of a physical support with a hint, in its translucency, of a window, but onto only the wall on which its hangs. Chirulescu could be engaged in an inquiry into how pictures disclose what they do, without letting what is being disclosed distract from a focus on the act of disclosure itself. Appearances, her work suggests, consist of some unanalysable synthesis of projection and reception, which corresponds to the essential ambivalence of painterly ontology. Contemporary painting tends rather to veer one way or other: into the self-concealment of illusionism or the bric-a-brac of formalism, with abstract painting as a litany of formal ticks, valued for the niche they establish. Here we have a more specific definition of abstraction. To abstract something from something else is literally to remove it into a less material realm, conditional on projections. But Chirulescu’s paintings do not allow us to escape their vehicles, only to intuit the possibility of doing so. They are traps that turn seeing into seeing-into – if never quite into seeing-as – as if laid by an inveterate sceptic, who refuses to let herself believe that even that first step is possible, but never gives up on the hope of taking it. —Mark Prince Marieta Chirulescu, born 1974 in Sibiu, Romania, lives in Berlin, Germany, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, Germany, where she graduated in 2004. She is a professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Münster. She received numerous scholarships and awards, including the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome (2015), the Lingener Art Prize in Lingen (2014), the Villa Aurora Residency in Los Angeles (2012), and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Bucharest (2006). Solo exhibitions include: Phase (with Fred Sandback), Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin (2026); Private Life (with Ana Botezatu), Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2025); They Said So, Galeria Fonti, Napoli (2023); Marieta Chirulescu, Plan B, Berlin (2020); Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2019); Pale Fire, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2016); Cytwombly Cyfonti, Galeria Fonti, Napoli (2016); Marieta Chirulescu, Kunsthalle Lingen, Lingen (2014); Marieta Chirulescu, White Cube Bermondsey, London (2011); Marieta Chirulescu, Kunstverein Nürnberg (2011); Marieta Chirulescu, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2010); Marieta Chirulescu, Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz (2009); Marieta Chirulescu, Projektraum der Temporären Kunsthalle Berlin, (2009).

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