Ivan Gallery at the Independent Art Fair New York

The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York is pleased to support the return of the Bucharest-based Ivan Gallery at the Independent, New York’s most experimental contemporary international art fair taking place in Tribeca from 9 to 12 May 2024. The Romanian gallery, one of the most international Romanian visual arts platforms, partners with the Ukrainian Voloshyn Gallery to jointly present two painters from different eras yet bound by a unique stylistic dialogue: the late Romanian artist Simona Runcan (1942-2007) and young Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska.

The show will present a selection of Runcan's works from the series “Interior, Icons, Inclinations” dating back to 1998-2003, which attests to her multivalent understanding of space. The compositional strangeness of these invented rooms, or sections of rooms, highlights a major conceptual source of her work: the thematization of the image itself. The artist's neo-avant-garde practice was marginalized within the state-controlled communist art system and has been posthumously rediscovered since 2016. Life alongside death is a recurring theme in Shahmuradova's recent works exhibited at the International, which were made against the backdrop of Russia's war in Ukraine, bringing forth human faces and bodies to dissolve and transform into new forms, laced with references to the paranormal.

Access to the fair is by ticket only. More details on the organizers' website: Tickets. 

About the IVAN GALLERY

Ivan Gallery opened in 2007 with a program that make the works of Romanian and East European artists more available to a broader, international audience. The gallery’s portfolio includes established names like Geta Brătescu, Paul Neagu, Lia Perjovschi, Ion Grigorescu, as well as emergent artists like the duos Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu and Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Cristina David, Ștefan Sava or Iulia Toma. Ivan Gallery also represents Romanian artists living and working abroad, like Bartha Sandor or Mădălina Zaharia, alongside foreign artists, like Elijah Burgher, Ross Taylor, and Jaro Varga. The gallery’s other focus has been on documenting and exhibiting internationally the conceptualist and experimental practice of insufficiently known Romanian artists active in the second part of the 20th century, like Horia Bernea, Simona Runcan, and Florina Coulin.

Photo credit: Simona Runcan, Icon and Flowered Rug, 1998, oil on canvas, 36.81 x 36.81 inch framed, courtesy of the Estate of Simona Runcan and Ivan Gallery, Bucharest