In the middle of the pandemic, artists are finding countless ways to continue their practice and lift our spirits. Eight Romanian artists have taken our challenge with the kind of ingenuity one would expect from highly creative minds and are ready to share with us and the world, every week, how the current situation impacts them and their artistic imagination. The last episode in our series, ART FIGHTS CORONA, presents ingenious Sasha Meret, a well-established sculptor and draftsman with international recognition, whose artworks explore the interaction between shape and pattern in sculptural constructs, requiring recycled elements that are components of his creation and assemblage.
Photo credit@Robert Whitman
#EPISODE 8 - SASHA MERET
Sasha Meret (b.1955, Romania) began studying art at an early age, and earned a BA in 1974, and an MA in 1979. After his arrival in New York (1987), he studied printmaking with Tony Harrison at Columbia University. Meret's work encompasses a wide range of techniques and styles, combining painting, drawing, photography, digital imaging with printmaking techniques like intaglio, woodcut, aquatint, monotype, working in a variety of styles, from representational to abstract. His imagery reflects his spiritual explorations, blending European, African, Asian, and esoteric symbolism in a highly personal visual language. He sees the creative process as a search to find ways of revealing the unexpected – the perpetual changing nature of everything that surrounds us. For over 20 years Sasha Meret collaborated as a weekly illustrator for "The New York Times", "International Herald Tribune", "Washington Post” and has illustrated several books for "Simon and Schuster", "Harper Collins", "Henry Holt" and other publishing houses. He currently lives and works in New York City, and he had exhibits in Europe, Japan, China and the U.S.
WATCH EPISODE 8: The Guardian
"During this Stay at Home and the social distancing period I actually took advantage and worked on a portfolio of sculpture assemblages in combination with other media like lights, and 3D designing . The coincidence is, if there is such a thing that more than a couple of years ago I started this piece that was simultaneously off putting and attractive, almost funny. The tittle is very sobering : The Guardian. It can make you think of a virus, but then it looks so categorically grounded and the almost welcoming gesture it takes you by surprise. Is it a Superhero descending into the invisible chaos to fight the evil viruses, or an agent of Gaia, trying to warn us about the destructive path we have taken. The jury is still out on that one! In times of economic and social hardship it is more likely than not , especially for the creative people to take refuge in an alternate reality or something like that. "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams was the trigger for the concept for my series of sculptures-assemblages The Plastic Menagerie. It was 2008, the time of the great economic crash! It took me a while to understand that the series I am currently working on is The Pandemic Menagerie" (Sasha Meret, June 2020).