Romanian artists team Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor present their most recent project, Appointment with History, at the Lombard Fried Projects gallery in New York City. This exhibition marks their first personal show in the US and inaugurates the new season of the gallery.

“In their series of paintings, Vatamanu and Tudor enact processes of collective and personal remembering. The catalyst for the series was an anti-capitalist demonstration the artists witnessed in Basel, with its insignia and banners familiar to them from their youth in [communist] Romania. The compact, small-format paintings are products of a painterly exploration undertaken in quest of a new symbol of communist utopia, which includes its own failures and scars. The artist duo research their motifs of utopian ideologies and their implications for social conditions in archives, schoolbooks, photographs, and propaganda films, and come up with familiar images. The audio-installation "Communist Manifesto/Manifestul comunismului" comprises a lectern with live microphone, rows of chairs, and loudspeakers over which a reading of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848) is audible. Overlaying the images, the soundtrack calls on the viewer/listener to become conscious of ideological stratifications and to question the division of theory and practice.” - Silke Baumann

The exhibition is presented with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York.

Press Dossier