Vlad Nanca
That ’70s Show
November 15, 2014–January 10, 2015
Opening: Friday, November 14, 7pm
Boccanera Gallery
via Milano 128/130
38122 Trento
Italy
Hours: Monday–Saturday 10am–7pm
or by appointment
T + 39 0461 984206
M + 39 340 5747013
info [at] arteboccanera.com
Boccanera is delighted to present Romanian artist Vlad Nancă’s first solo exhibition in Italy. This show will center upon Nancă’s long-term engrossment in ’70s knick knacks, decors, interior designs, texts, and propaganda materials. The exhibition’s title, That ’70s Show, borrowed from the homonymous American sitcom, is setting the tone for this unprecedented meeting between Arte Povera and the ’70s bling and glitz or, even better, between ostalgie and nostalgia. It is not the first time that Vlad Nancă is using the retrospective voice within his work. While revising the past—gathering oddments, collecting clichés, and further pressing them all against a new matrix—he is actually feeding the now in a similar way extrapolation may be used to design the future. Popular culture, personal histories, folklore, national icons become inextricably intertwined, body of a work that is equally appropriate(d) and playful. Collecting is turned into a creative tool, as Nancă—the urban semiologist and ideological contortionist—forces all his anthologies in. That ’70s Show becomes a hybrid flea market—Crystal-Palace, or rather a garden of surprises decorated in a modernist vein—with porcelain polar bears (replicas of Francois Pompon’s famous Art Deco L’Ours Blanc), Brancusian sculptures, crystal light fixtures, a ceramic tiles mobile (an homage to Hans Hollein’s 1972 Austrian Pavillion at the Venice Biennial and to the work of Jean-Pierre Raynaud), and a bittersweet slideshow. It is Vlad Nancă’s version of the nowness of art.
Vlad Nanca (b. 1979) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. In parallel with his early art practice, Vlad Nanca was an active participant in the coagulation of the young artist scene in Bucharest, Romania. In 2003 he was one of the founding members of 2020 initiative, under which among other events, he hosted the Home Gallery (with exhibitions of Liliana Basarab, Ioana Nemes, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Janek Simon, etc), started the Incepem emailing list and the Incepem fanzine. His early works employ political and cultural symbols, often using word-play to evoke nostalgia and referencing Romania’s recent history and challenging the social and political climate, Vlad Nanca’s recent interests evolve around (public) space and its use and functions, materializing in sculptures, objects and installations. Among many other group shows, Nancă’s work has been included in A few grams of Red, Yellow, Blue, at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2014); Image to be projected until it vanishes at Museion in Bolzano (2011); On Difference #3 at Stuttgart Kunstverein; and Social Cooking at NGBK Berlin (2007).
