SERBAN SAVU

The tensions his work generates are never resolved. Preservation and destruction become difficult to distinguish; artifacts and artworks raise the same questions about what history chooses to remember and what it allows to disappear. As critic Shana Nys Dambrot has written, his paintings “physically look and feel very old and very new at the same time — post-impressionist, post-classical, post-Soviet — but not Post-Modern,” repositioning “both sociopolitical history and art history as feedback loops, as weavings in which the threads can no longer be unraveled.” Filtered through historical memory yet emerging from close, almost neutral observation of contemporary reality, Savu’s works become simultaneously narrative and reflection — windows onto a present moment that remains, as he shows us, inseparable from the past that defines and confines it.

Serban Savu was born 1978 in Sighisoara, Romania, and lives and works in Cluj. Recent solo exhibitions include: Caprice, Caprice, Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw (2026); Golden Ages, Plan B, Berlin (2025); What Work Is, The Romanian National Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Giardini Della Biennale, Venice (2024); Makeovers, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (2021); Serban Savu – Echinoctiu, Kunsthalle Bega, Timisoara (2020); Serban Savu - En dérive, Le Lait Centre D’art Contemporain, Albi (2019); Heroes, Saints and Other Figures, Plan B, Berlin (2018); Serban Savu, Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese, Rome (2018).

Selected group exhibitions include: Innauguration, Plan B Foundation, Cluj (2026); Play of Forms. The North-West Architecture Annual, Clădirea Minerul, Baia Mare (2026); Transylvanian Painting Today, curated by Jane Neal, Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc (2026); IT’S NO CRIME TO TICKLE TIME 20 Years of Plan B, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2025); One Eye Laughing, the Other Crying. Art From Romania. Ovidiu Șandor Collection, The International Cultural Centre, Krakow (2025); The Twist: Failing Empires, Triumphant Provinces, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (2024); Reenactment – Recostituire il passato, Galleria D’Arte Accademia di Romania, Rome (2024); Remembering Peace, Kyiv Biennial, Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2023); Looking Anew and Beyond, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke (2023); Lost in the Moment That Follows, Ways of Collecting: Ovidiu Șandor Collection, Kunsthalle Prague, Prague (2023); The Influencing Machine, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2022); Art and The City 1974-2021, Museum of Recent Art (MARe), Bucharest (2021); Geta Bratescu, Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Muresan, Serban Savu, Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome (2019); Ciprian Muresan and Serban Savu, L’entretien infini, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018-2019); La Brique, the Brick, Caramida, La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse (2019); Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining The Sublime, Hall Art Foundation, New York (2016); Tracing Shadows, PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Defaced, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado (2014); Romanian Scenes, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris (2013).

Text courtesy Galeria Plan B.