With a career spanning more than seven decades, Geta Brătescu (1926, Ploiești – 2018, Bucharest) established herself as one of the most important voices on the Romanian contemporary art scene, leaving behind a body of work which is as rich as it is conceptually complex. She studied literature and visual arts under the guidance of professors George Călinescu and Camil Ressu respectively, both influential figures in the development of her artistic practice, be it her literary activity or her work as an illustrator and graphic designer, or her continued experimentation in various media: from drawing to multiples, from tapestry, collage, and objects to performance, photography, and video. With the exception of tapestry, which she—almost programmatically—left behind (perceiving too great a distance between imagination, vision, and the moment of bringing the work to completion), the remainder of her tools have been kept alive, alongside a conceptual accuracy for the formation of her visual universe.

A backwards gaze—directed both toward her own self, and toward the cultural history that shaped her rich intellectual background—and one of Geta Brătescu’s most powerful statements, highlighting her artistic credo, “In the beginning, there was the drawing” provides a point of access to a body of work in which multiple working media are subject to the logic of experimentation, while drawing continuously retains the virtues of an ordering mental process, essentialised down to the line. The act of pre-figuration, through the mind’s ability to think in images, before letting the hand channel the formal expression that tends towards that ‘balance between suggestion and concept’, alongside the dynamic quality of drawing, in this particular sense, suggests the complexity of movement in the space of a truly living laboratory: the ‘mental studio’. For Geta Brătescu, fixed images become the ‘vehicles’ that guarantee the passage through this space, not far from what Aby Warburg formulated as ‘Bilderfahrzeuge’ [image-vehicles], living, open, and perpetually transforming instances of memory, whether individual or collective. The representation that acquires this status is the sometimes unexpected result of a process that no longer obeys a linear logic (in relation to history/chronology, or to the unmediated rendering of realities, etc.), but stems from a fertile, practically unlimited territory.

The exhibition ‘In the beginning, there was the drawing’ offers an insight into the universe of Geta Brătescu, guided by some of her central themes and explorations, in a selection that brings together a substantial body of work, created from the 1960s onwards, including drawings and collages from the last years of her career. Like the free play between memory and imagination that she used to evoke, this collage of fragments recomposes one of the possible renderings of her artistic identity—an inevitably incomplete portrait, but one that invites us to discover, step by step, one of the personalities who left a strong mark on Romanian contemporary art. And for whom drawing was at once a process, a form of writing, a state of being, a dance and sometimes a song (of the line), a (serious) game, the supreme mark of artistic expression and expressiveness, inextricably linked to a certain mobility of the spirit, never isolated, but part of a whole which was skillfully laid out by the artist in a free space.