Ciprian Muresan Show Highlighted in ArtForum

Ciprian Muresan @ Mihai Nicodim Gallery through Dec.
image via Artforum

Ciprian Muresan, whose 2009 work Dog Luv is featured in After the Fall, has been recently highlighted in a review by Artforum. The article profiles Muresan's solo show at Mihai Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles. His second solo show in the States, the article praises the "reexamination of monumentality in the wake of modernism."

Like most of Muresan's video work, Dog Luv is composed of a series of brief vignettes that make use of simple gestures to address the more weighty issues concerning violence, consumerism, and existential struggle. It was a central piece at the Romanian Pavillion during the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Dog Luv (2009), DVD-PAL, run time 30 minutes.
image via hvcca.org

Throughout the film, dog puppets exchange in a conversation about politics and art education as if it were a primal need, an animal instinct that both propels society as well as miring it in unnecessary blather. A projection of fragments of a world of transformation, a world in which aspects of security, control, and individual choice are brought to the forefront.

Mureşan's cross-genre work considers the ways in which post- communism and globalization endlessly complicate each other. Deeply reflective of Romanian Art Education in the 1990s during the era of political freedom, Mureşan works to imagine a dialogue between Western and local art aesthetics that goes beyond a rejection of the neo-orthodox style, the popularized method of art making before the fall of Communism. This is talked more at length in the Artforum piece.