Dan Perjovschi

For this project, titled 17.11.2011, the artist will fill the exhibition space with the Spanish newspapers from the day of the opening. This project, halfway between drawing and performance, delves into the usual concerns of the Romanian artist. By intervening each of their pages with a drawing, he manages to elicit a comment, to emphasise or criticise the reality of our country, in an exercise of true appropriation.

His apparently simple drawings, with quick traces, cause a visual impact strengthened by their relation to the surrounding exhibition environment, creating a multiple dialogue between the artist, his work, the spectator, and the exhibition space. This very immediate response turns Dan Perjovschi's work into a kind of thermometer of contemporaneity as seen through irony, humour and a certain tenderness.

Dan's reputation in Romania was first established by the political drawings and cartoons he started to create in 1991 for the magazine Revista 22, a leading publication of the Romanian resistance, founded by the Social Dialogue Group of which he was a member. Nowadays, he is known worldwide for his large-scale drawing installations, in which he used the psychology of humour to comment on the social, political and cultural conditions, from local and national topics to global ones.

Aesthetically and politically charged, their work helps the beholder to reflect, to feel and to smile, a crucial combination in a political and cultural situation where concerns affecting freedom and autonomy, the construction of knowledge and a need to confront the present-day experience with simplicity, are increasingly more demanding. Dan and Lia Perjovschi's practice deals with crisis, change and with the integrity that, beyond the personal, is required to involve oneself in the world and inspire spectators to live with courage.