2018

Central Pavilion ”Art on Stage” curated by Hervé Mikaeloff created a couple of multidisciplinary scenes, where the art pieces and artists behave as actors. Artists shared their vision on architectures, utopias, savoir-faire, memory and their willingness to receive or free themselves of public heritage.

In 2018, the Museum Pavilion ”Natural-Cultural” guided the public along with a non-linear exhibition route dedicated to Romanian art from the early 1990s, whose curatorial concept entailed reflection in the margins of unique moments and forms of visual experiment that bring to light the presence of structural affinities at the level of creative preoccupations and interests. The exhibition samples areas of ideatic crystallisation brought about by inner necessity, by choices that outlast history’s narratives, and which articulate forms of thinking and artistic research that interweave, in a manner new and defining for Romanian art, an interest in traditional culture, in the natural world, in the determinations of the existential datum. What remained visible throughout the series were the axes of a framework of knowledge and representation of life and the world where artistic practice aspires to the essentialisation of form, toward universality of the artistic act, and toward an embrace of the spiritual.

BCR exhibited part of its thesaurus at Art Safari through a selection of Romanian paintings, from Nicolae Tonitza to Ion Ţuculescu. The bank’s collection, which also includes a contemporary art section, developed mainly on the stylistic coordinates of the interwar period. It is a time when great artists, with strong visions, have contributed to the emergence of Romanian art with a diversified approach to the happenings and moments of the Romanian space, but also in Europe, in line with the great aesthetic directions of the time. (Dana Crişan)

The exhibit Ceausescu. Another Story. Romanian Art in Primăverii Palace Art Safari 2018 was an endeavor novel in its subject and perspective. Up to this moment, there have been exhibits dedicated to the Golden Epoch and to art borne out of or subsumed to the regime. With this exhibit we ventured outside of this established pattern, in an attempt to present the public with a different image. It is the first time that these valuable pieces are brought out from a space which had been closed to the public before March 2016.

Artists in 2018: Răzvan Boar, Ioana Stanca, Vlad Nancă, Vlad Olariu, Mircea Cantor, Șerban Savu, Cristi Rusu, Ciprian Mureșan, Marius Bercea, Arantxa Etcheverria, Alex Mirutziu, Radu Cioca, Daniela Pălimariu, Răzvan Anton

• 33.946 visitors
• 2.719 visitors at the preview
• total value of artworks: 10 milioane de euro
• 1 milion de euro the most expensive artwork: „Portrait of a Child” by Constantin Brâncuși
• 2.163 children attended Art Safari Kids workshops and guided tours
• 100 participants at Art Talks program
• artworks were lended by Romanian and international museums, such as Centre Pompidou and Louis Vuitton Fondation from Paris, but also from important private collections like Romanian Commercial Bank and RA-APPS. Part of the artpieces presented at Art Safari 2018 were created specially for this exhibition.
• largest artwork: 450 x 900 cm, Anthroposynaptic (Mircea Cantor), Louis Vuitton Foundation Collection
• 9 oversized trucks and 1850 kilometers from Germany to George Enescu Sq. in Bucharest, to bring the pavilion in Romania
• the pavilion construction lasted 15 days