CORPOREALITIES. UNCERTAIN BODIES – 2020

In no other period in the past has the human body been so much exposed, explored and exploited than it is today. Never before has corporeality gained so much freedom – and this term literally seems to designate a new dimension, that of the autonomy and of the body’s own conquered reality.

Ada Muntean’s series of corporealities examine exactly this autonomous reality of bodies, perceived contextually – from the sensual to the sadomasochistic body, from the fashion body to the deformed one, from the reinterpreted historical portrait to the self-portrait, from the symbiotic body to the futuristic and perishable body.
The bodies represented in this series, says Ada Muntean, describe a familiar reality without delimiting it with certainty: from a series of possible typologies or human characters, the appearance of a culture or a society, to the confession of a personal history. The deliberately ambiguous identity shapes originate in the artist’s very intention to create a space of representation that accumulates as many valences and nuances as possible, while tolerating duality and opposites. Many times, the body is a face in Ada Muntean’s works, and often it is subject to metamorphosis and movement, always tempted to take new and new forms. But what do these bodily shapes say about us? The ambiguous and transitory identity facets visually suggest a disintegration, a dematerialization of the body – and ideologically personify the existential decadence.

“For me, Ada Muntean argues, the body represents the beginning and the end, the most important element in our physical life, which describes the palpable reality to which we refer. The human body is the cornerstone of my artistic exploration. I refer to it as a conceptual and expressive tool, meant to reveal the complexity of contemporary human existence in an immediate, intense and incisive way. The “keyboard” that the human body proposes for experimentation, in artistic terms, is from my point of view endless as resources and seductive as possibilities. The exploration of the body becomes the exploration of the self, and the exploration of the self becomes the exploration of the world. The artistic approach turns into a gesture with a strong existential load, and the examination of identity stances acquire the valences of a contemporary social and ontological analysis”.

Curator: Irina Ungureanu
Estopia Art Gallery Bucharest
Solo show 2020

Some of the artworks were part of the group show In Between (Us) @Tempini, a collateral event of Art Encounters Biennial Timișoara 2019. Artists: Zoița (Delia Călinescu), Dragoș Neagoe, Răzvan Neagoe, Mălina Ionescu, Ada Muntean. Curator: Mălina Ionescu