THE ESTATE OF STEFAN BERTALAN

Stefan Bertalan studied at the Institute of Fine Arts ‘Ion Andreescu’ in Klausenburg. Beginning in 1962 he was Professor at the School of Fine Arts in Timişoara. From 1970 to 1981 he was lecturing at the Faculty of Engineering in Timişoara (Department of Architecture).

In 1965 Bertalan co-founded Group 111, the first artist collective for experimental art in Romania. Followed by his membership in the famous experimental art group Sigma starting in 1970. From 1964 to 2014 he was also a member of Timişoara’s Department of the Union of Artists.

The artist represented Romania at the 46^th Venice Biennale in 1995. In 2013 his work was included in the exhbition The Encyclopedic Palace at La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Massimiliano Gioni in Venice.

Initially a driving force of the Romanian neo-constructivist avant-garde, Stefan Bertalan’s research into cybernetics and system theory informed his search for overarching patterns and systems in natural forms. Close observation of organic processes and systematic studies of shapes found in organic, vegetal, and mineral forms eventually led to the artist’s development of an interconnected cosmology of all things.

The artist’s 1981 move from Timișoara where he had originally developed his art, engaged with other artists and taught at university to the much smaller town of Sibiu initiated what Erwin Kessler has called an ‘inner emigration’ that began long before the actual departure from Romania to Germany in 1986. The loss of his artistic context and the isolation of the new environment intensified the artist’s retreat to observation of the natural world and even to an identification with nature. Initiated by a series of intense dreams, to which the artist referred as apparitions, Bertalan began a series of emotionally charg ed drawings that insert the artist’s body into those of plants, creating hybrid formations.

Text courtesy Esther Schipper.