Dumitru Gorzo's THE FOREST Takes Over the Institute

Iconoclast provocateur Dumitru Gorzo (b. 1975), the bad boy of contemporary Romanian art, is ready to fill the Institute with a ”forest” of striking works, highlighting his steady commitment to innovation and experimentation. The exhibition marks the artist's first solo show at the RCI and solidifies his status as one of Romania’s most prominent contemporary artists, whose practice relies on a bold conceptual approach with a twist of neo-pop sensibility and a satiric attitude toward societal issues. 

Gorzo was born in Ieud, northern Romania, and currently lives and works in Bucharest and Brooklyn, NY. He is the co-founder of ROSTOPASCA, one of the most influential artist groups in Romania of the last decades. He has harnessed a multitude of mediums in his career, and his works range from paintings to sculpture, to hand-hewn wooden reliefs with a Romanian folkloric aesthetic, to works on paper and installations. Gorzo’s sculptural language combines convention

and innovation in a lyrical way, raising questions about the nature of forms: how volume relates to space, how form relates to context, how tangible objects become images and how images become tangible objects.

“The Forest”, bringing together works from 2015 to this day, illustrates Gorzo’s use of space and his voracious need to create a place where living entities can be lost, the boundaries of the space are unclear, and the borderless relationship between nature and humans exists in a continuous form. 

The exhibition, co-produced with Slag Gallery NYC, presents a comprehensive installation, whose impact is enhanced by the clever use of wood, light, and color. In the artist’s own words:

The works from "The Forest" are composites. They have multiple sources, some of which they resemble, while others function as starting points for something new. Finally, as an installation, the composites have the complexity of a natural environment, which is both familiar and surprising. 

The forms are raw, chaotic, and uncontrollable. They have their own life, somehow independent of my will. I often start with quite a clear intention, but there are, at times, radical alterations in the process. It might be their logical growth that dictates the cuts. Other times, the material I'm using asks for a specific approach and the relations with other things in my head or the studio. 

The works from The Forest represent years of work and observation, an accumulation that started in 2015 till today. (Dumitru Gorzo)

The exhibition opens at RCI's Brâncuși Gallery on Friday, November 19, 2021, 7-9 pm. Please RSVP here.

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Opening event: November 19, 2021

Exhibition run: November 19, 2021 – January 19, 2022

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Please be advised that all guests will need to be fully vaccinated to enter the premises, meaning that the event must take place at least 14 days after your final vaccine dose. Guests will have to provide proof of full vaccination along with an appropriate ID matching the name on their documentation. You can display proof of vaccination on your smartphone, present a physical copy or use the New York State Excelsior Pass. For more information, please visit the NYC Health official website here.