“A closer look”: a new perspective on the Corneliu Baba permanent exhibition at MNArT

The National Museum of Art Timișoara is pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition “A Close Look”, which will take place on Thursday, November 7, at 6:00 pm, in the Corneliu Baba Collection Gallery. This exhibition brings together the largest and most comprehensive public collection of works by Corneliu Baba, presented from a new and innovative curatorial perspective.

The exhibition “A Close Look” includes an impressive number of works from the patrimony of the National Art Museum Timișoara and Corneliu Baba’s donation, as well as works borrowed from the artist’s collection and from the private collection SUN-Collection. The selection of works was carefully made by the curator, Maria Muscalu-Albani, in order to offer the public a new interaction with Corneliu Baba’s work.

Concerned with exploring the possibilities offered by the pictorial language, especially with shaping the pictorial matter in order to achieve fine compositional harmonies, Corneliu Baba is the one who manages to propose, in the second half of the 20th century, in the socio-political conditions of the communist period in Romania, the most consistent plastic approach – his only reason for being, feeling and thinking. His portraits cover a wide range of subjects, from the human face to object portraiture, collective portraiture and portraiture of the space in which his characters move.

In a diary entry, the artist confessed: “In the midst of the general din, I stubbornly remain me. Maybe that’s the hardest thing. The idea that haunts me is that the chance of my painting is precisely the misfortune of living in the East and taking part in all the nightmares of this age that obsessively follow me in the drama of the painting I do. My fantasy needed the winding road of the human drama seen in all its cruelty, violence and cowardice that continues to fill history for centuries .”

The exhibition brings together the major subjects of Corneliu Baba’s painting, organized chronologically and thematically, highlighting key works and proposing a broad discourse that includes, along with painting, an incursion into the world of writings, studio notes, contextualizing the work within the era in which he lived, painted and wrote.

Very close to the painter’s birthday (November 18, 1906, in Craiova) and two years before the 20th anniversary of the inauguration of the Timișoara Art Museum, the reopening of the Corneliu Baba Permanent Collection exhibition offers a close-up look at the confession of faith of this artist who spent his adolescence and early youth in the atmosphere of Timișoara, which he often evokes.

The concept of the exhibition is signed by Maria Muscalu-Albani, and the graphics and production are by Squaremedia.ro. The exhibition was made possible thanks to financial support totaling approximately 185 thousand euros. This amount was secured from the estate of the legatee.