Anthropocene
ANTHROPOSCAPES by BERTA M. MOLDOVEANU
December 28, 2020 | Cosmina Marcela OLTEAN ArtPageBerta Maria Moldoveanu graduated the MA in Theories and Practices in Visual Arts and the MA in Painting at the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, "George Enescu" National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania, between 2014-2020. In the last years, she contributed with artworks for exhibitions like "Niveluri de realitate"/ „Levels of reality” (Galeria apARTe, Iași, 2015, 2016, 2017) and "Vise în Balcani" (Galeria Artut, Bucharest, 2015). Also, she presented a series of personal art projects at the Palace of Culture Iași (2007), "B. P. Hasdeu" Museum (Câmpina, 2008) și "N. Grigorescu" Museum (Câmpina, 2008), "Vasile Pîrvan" Museum (Bârlad, 2008), "Friedrich Schiller" Cultural Center / "J. L. Calderon" Cultural Center (Bucharest, 2011), Palatul Parlamentului (Bucharest, 2013).
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| Photos - Berta's personal archive |
She sais that what inspires her work are the daily life experiences and ideas from the books she reads. The artists she admires are Anselm Kiefer, George Baselitz and Antoni Tapies. Her practice is based on the instinct. One of her most important projects is ANTHROPOSCAPES, a solo exhibition presented in apARTe Gallery, Iași, curated by Cătălin Gheorghe.
This was a project produced by Vector Studio in partnership with Asociația Culturală AltIași and UNAGE as part of Carte Blanche aux Jeunes Créateurs programme financially supported by Institut Français in Iaşi.
ANTHROPOSCAPES, a series of post-pictorial artworks, highlights the alterations of the world's ecosystems through noxious man-made intervention imply a critical moment in geological history: the acceleration of the Anthropocene. “Beyond the politicization of recognizing or ignoring climate change, there could be identified with precision and emotion the degenerations of the environment caused by the impact of agricultural industrialization, the chaotic development of urbanization, the greenhouse effect, the acidification of the oceans, the effects of deforestation, the deterioration of biodiversity or even the extinction of biomasses from the spheres of plants or animal species. The consequences of the structural rapacity of the global economic system are felt in the accelerating changes in the biosphere, in changing weather processes and seasons cycles, in radioactive pollution”, points out the curator.
In recent years, actions were taken into the direction of an ecological turn in art that highlights the eco-social role that artistic practice might have in denouncing the effects of global capitalism and creating conditions for awareness of the need for an ecological ethics with immediate effects on rebuilding the deteriorated relationship between social life and the natural world. At the same time, one of the radical questions of contemporaneity is whether the material production of art would not in its turn contribute to the degradation of ecological desideratum.
Negotiating the meanings of ecological activism and of the neomaterialist movement, Berta Maria Moldoveanu realizes a series of post-pictorial artworks in which the abstract and informal representations of the geological stratigraphy interferes with the immersive theatricality of the exhibitional installation. In the production of her works, she uses, literally and metaphorically, both natural and artificially created materials, from river stones, dust and fragments of marble, sawdust, linseed oil, sand, hemp and coal, to acrylic liquid (monomer), glue, pitch, adhesives and oxide pigments. The works strengthens the reflection on the critical topic of Anthropocene, being presented as a poetic periodic table of the elements of artistic intention to produce a re-cognition of the conditions of relational survival in the biospheric ecosystem”, highlights Cătălin Gheorghe in his curatorial statement.
Negotiating the meanings of ecological activism and of the neomaterialist movement, Berta Maria Moldoveanu realizes a series of post-pictorial artworks in which the abstract and informal representations of the geological stratigraphy interferes with the immersive theatricality of the exhibitional installation. In the production of her works, she uses, literally and metaphorically, both natural and artificially created materials, from river stones, dust and fragments of marble, sawdust, linseed oil, sand, hemp and coal, to acrylic liquid (monomer), glue, pitch, adhesives and oxide pigments. The works strengthens the reflection on the critical topic of Anthropocene, being presented as a poetic periodic table of the elements of artistic intention to produce a re-cognition of the conditions of relational survival in the biospheric ecosystem”, highlights Cătălin Gheorghe in his curatorial statement.
