Stefan Bertalan Copacul predică oamenilor (cum s-a născut viața pe pământ) / The Tree Preaches to the People (How Life Appeared on Earth), 1985

A driving force of the Romanian neo-constructivist avant-garde, Ştefan Bertalan cofounded the first experimental art collective in the country, 111, and the progressive transdisciplinary collective Sigma, before being exiled by the communist regime to Sibiu in 1981 and then self-exiling to Germany in 1986.

His close observation of organic processes and systematic studies of repeating shapes (such as spirals, grids, and fractals) led to the artist’s belief in an interconnected cosmology of all things. Simultaneously an obsessively detailed researcher and a believer in the spiritual and sublime, throughout his life Bertalan had vivid visions that he called ‘apparitions.’ In these apparitions, documented in numerous portraits, the human body becomes intertwined with that of a plant in a transformation that anticipates contemporary critiques of the Anthropocene.