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The most comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the work of Romanian artist Ștefan Bertalan (1930–2014) will be presented by the Art Encounters Foundation between April 3 - June 29, 2025. Titled “In Tune With The World”, the exhibition is conceived and curated by Bernard Blistène, Honorary Director of the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Spanning an area 1,000 square meters, the exhibition brings together over 250 works by the artist, including paintings, works on paper, photographs, films, and a significant volume of documents, aiming to present Bertalan’s neo-avant-garde art in a thorough and updated manner, both as a national and international premiere.
Diverse and hybrid, Bertalan’s work combines ongoing research through paintings, drawings, installations, photographs, and performances with an endless inquiry—much like a logbook—into the nature of creation and humanity’s place in the universe. In its variations and metamorphoses, Bertalan’s art reflects a researcher aware of the laws of the universe, one in which he confronts the extreme tensions that animate and disturb his existence.
The multiplicity of his approaches, the extreme diversity of disciplines and tools he employs, as well as the profoundly hybrid dimension of a practice blending the most descriptive language with the invention of graphic and geometric schemes, in which abstraction and figuration are inseparable, attest to an original and remarkable investigation. It is an exceptional material, a retrospective meant to shed light on this unique body of work.
Born in the village of Răcăștia (Hunedoara County) in 1930 and passing away in Timișoara in 2014, Ștefan Bertalan studied at the “Ion Andreescu” Academy of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca between 1956 and 1962. After graduating, he was appointed as a professor at the Timișoara Art High School. From 1970 to 1981, he taught at the Polytechnic University of Timișoara in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, which he was forced to leave when he decided to emigrate. He settled in 1986 in Öhringen, near Stuttgart, Germany, where he lived until 2012.
He regularly returned to Timișoara from 1990, the city he cherished, where he also passed away in 2014.
In 1965, Bertalan co-founded Group 111 with Roman Cotoșman and Constantin Flondor, probably the first experimental art collective in Communist Romania, followed shortly by the renowned experimental and interdisciplinary Sigma group (1969–1980), which he founded alongside Constantin Flondor and Doru Tulcan, and which attracted artists, thinkers, and researchers from various disciplines. From 1964 to 2014, Bertalan was also a member of the Union of Visual Artists of Timișoara.
A prominent figure of the Romanian neo-constructivist avant-garde of the late 1950s and 1960s, Ștefan Bertalan deepened his research in cybernetics and systems in the 1970s, based on natural forms and organic, mineral, and vegetal processes, which led him, around ten years later, to develop a genuine cosmology in which humans and nature are interdependent.
Ștefan Bertalan’s works have been exhibited in numerous renowned institutions, including: the Art Museum in Chișinău (2024); Mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (2022); Kunstmuseum, Liechtenstein (2020); The Art Museum in Timișoara (2012); the Venice Biennale (1995); the Bucharest Architecture Institute (1979), and many others.
Bernard Blistène (born 1955) is a French curator living and working in Paris who has initiated numerous exhibitions in France and abroad. He served as the Director of the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, from 2013 to 2021 and has been its Honorary Director since. He is currently the President of the “New Worlds” program of the French Ministry of Culture.
The exhibition Ștefan Bertalan – In Tune With The World will take place in the ISHO Office 1 building, located near the Art Encounters Foundation, and can be visited between April 3 and June 29, 2025.
The exhibition is supported by Banca Transilvania, co-financed by AFCN, and realized in collaboration with Esther Schipper and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, with the support of ISHO and the French Institute in Romania, Timișoara.