Serban Savu's skillfully rendered canvases capture the daily existence of people at work and leisure. Savu's realistic depictions of life in urban and rural landscapes evoke the essence of a rapidly changing society. Characterized by empathy and close observation, reduction and re-composition, his paintings are capable of initiating an assessment of the present moment understood in a wider, historical sense.
"Not unlike a Courbet mindset, in which classical tropes are applied as a filter through which to view the encroaching, democratized present, Savu's paintings physically look and feel very old and very new at the same time. It's post-impressionist, it's post-classical, it's post-Soviet — but it's not Post-Modern. It ignores the visual markers of linear time and repositions both sociopolitical history and art history as feedback loops, as weavings in which the threads can no longer be unraveled — as reflections of the current moment marked both by hope and despair, inseparable still from the past that defines and confines it." (Shana Nys Dambrot)
Serban Savu's installation What Work Is in the Romanian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2024 has been widely acclaimed. His project intervenes in the representational history of the laboring body, composing a complex iconography of work and leisure, primarily driven by a study of historical realism and its ideologies, as well as of the propaganda art of the Eastern Bloc. With purposefully anachronic instruments, Savu reflects on the contemporary world as a landscape of labor and alienation, where the boundaries that define "what work is" twist and shift to assimilate life in all its aspects, to transform it into a transactional asset.
Serban Savu, born 1978 in Sighisoara, Romania, lives and works in Cluj. He represented Romania at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, 2024.
Solo exhibitions include: 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); Pictures at an Exhibition, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2015); Close to Nature, David Nolan Gallery, New York (2011).
Group exhibitions include: Lost in the Moment That Follows, Ways of Collecting: Ovidiu Șandor Collection, Kunsthalle Prague, Prague (2023); Culturi agricole. Agricultura în arta românească modernă și contemporană, Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest (2022); The Influencing Machine, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2022); Art and The City 1974-2021, Museum of Recent Art, 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); Ex-East, past and recent stories of the Romanian Avant- Garde, Espace Niemeyer, Paris (2019); ... HOUNDED BY EXTERNAL EVENTS ..., Maureen Paley, London (2016); _Landscapes After Ruskin: _Redefining The Sublime, Hall Art Foundation, New York (2016); Appearance and Essence, Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara (2015); 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); Hotspot Cluj. New Romanian Art, ARKEN Museum for Modern Art, Ishoj, Denmark (2013).
Text courtesy Galeria Plan B.
