Exhibition-Event “MÉMOIRES” by SAMY BRISS at the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum
Opens at MACN, between July 27 – August 6, 2023: The second solo show of the artist SAMY BRISS in a museum in Romania, after the Museum of the Country of the Crișurilor in Oradea
The unique exhibition approach, presented, for the first time, this year at the Museum of the Country of Criss in Oradea and now on tour in Cluj-Napoca, includes over 100 works of painting, sculpture and graphics, from all stages of the artist’s creation, which have never been never publicly exhibited in Romania.
The Cluj-Napoca Art Museum (MACN), in collaboration with the Association for the Support of Fine Arts (ASAF), the French Cultural Institute, the Embassy of the State of Israel, the Rotenberg-Uzunov Gallery and the Center of Interest, presents, between July 27 and August 6, the exhibition retrospective of painting, sculpture and drawing by the Israeli artist of Romanian origin, Samy Briss, entitled MÉMOIRES.
The opening takes place on Thursday, July 27, 2023, at 18:00, at the headquarters of the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum (Bánffy Palace, P-ța Unirii no. 30), in the presence of the exhibiting artist and the initiator and curator of the exhibition, the art historian Adina Rentea, president of the Association for the Support of Fine Arts (ASAF), specialist with over 30 years of museum experience. Alongside the two will be their special guest, prof. univ. Dr. Florin Ştefan, vice-chancellor of the University of Art and Design (UAD) from Cluj-Napoca, president and executive director of the Center of Interest. The hosting offices go to the historian Lucian Nastasă-Kovács, manager of the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, the responsibility for coordinating the organization of the exhibition goes to the museographer Alexandra Sârbu.
After 12 years since the first and last exhibition in Romania, Samy Briss, outstanding personality of the international artistic world, returns home, for a retrospective exhibition that sums up more than 100 works of painting, sculpture and drawing.
“In his creation, the real and the imaginary coexist in a spectacular pictorial rhetoric, which individualizes him. Through the light that emerges from inside the works, with the show becoming an integral part of the plastic vision, Samy Briss relates the steps between material and immaterial, between the sacred and the profane. He is an artist who paints visions of ecstasy, pictorial expressions of spiritual thoughts, images of the inner universe”, says the initiator and curator of the exhibition, Adina Rentea.
From MACN we learn about the artist that he was born on Moldavian plains, in Iasi (May 18, 1930), between the National Theatre, the garden of Avram Goldfaden (the one who founded in Iasi, in 1876, the first professional Yiddish theater in the world) and the masterpiece of religious architecture, the Church of the Three Hierarchs. He attended the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts and, at the same time, between 1950 and 1954, attended the painter Camil Ressu’s workshop. The studies carried out in the formative proximity of Camil Ressu imposed the idea of rigor and self-demand against the background of an assumed freedom of expression, things that Briss learned immediately around one of the outstanding personalities of Romanian art, a titular member of the Romanian Academy.
Inventive and tenacious, Samy Briss has made creativity a form of expression of the deep self, capitalizing on the dialogue with the visual, essentialized in memorable expressions. The echoes of his childhood in Iasi, the architecture of the old monumental buildings in the beautiful Moldavian city, will accompany him, as a suggestive recovery of a time and a place, all his life. Between 1955 and 1957, he participated in the first exhibitions of painting and graphics. He makes theater sets and costumes and works as an assistant at the scenography department at the Bucharest Theater Institute, around some future great directors. In 1957, he exhibited for the first time at the Etching Triennale in Switzerland, where he represented Romania.
In 1958, Samy Briss, like many Romanian intellectuals, became one of the victims of the wave of “socialist realism”, the official art imposed by the communist regime.
His first painting exhibition in Bucharest is banned. He left Romania with his family at the end of 1959. After a long journey through Europe, passing through museums and art galleries in Vienna and Naples, and making countless sketches of the times he lived, he arrived by ship in Haifa, in Israel. Israel brings him closer to Jewish values and symbols, biblical themes, traditions, holidays and the art of klezmer musicians, Jewish folk music. Which we will find, of course, reflected in his work. He also now meets the co-founder of the Dada movement, Marcel Iancu, with whom he will have a fruitful and decisive friendship for the rest of his career. From 1961-1966, his name is associated with the creation of wall decorations for hospitals, libraries, hotels, public institutions.
At the urging of the sculptor Dani Karavan, the one who made the huge wall sculpture in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, called “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem”, Samy Briss exhibits for the first time in Tel Aviv. And until 1970, he participated in several group exhibitions in Israel and abroad.
But early 1971 brings Briss his first really big contract. The Parisian Romanet gallery invites him to exhibit in Paris and offers him an exclusivity contract for 5 years. With one condition: to move to Paris. Once the contract was accepted, his first exhibitions in France, the United States and around the world followed in 1972. The direct contact with experiences from the stylistic area of Picasso, Paul Klee, Victor Brauner or from the repertoire of Braque, or the painter from Vitebsk, Marc Chagall, reconfigured his heritage of images from the Romanian, Israeli, French space and beyond. As a recognition of the art and international appreciation enjoyed by his work, in 2019, Samy Briss was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, by the French government, at the suggestion of the great theater man and his good friend, Georges Banu.
The MÉMOIRES exhibition is the most extensive approach to the art of Samy Briss in Romania. More than 110 works of painting, sculpture, drawing, never exhibited “at home”, represent the heritage of this exhibition. They will be completed by landmarks of personal and artistic life, also not exhibited in Romania. Photos from the workshop, invitations to personal and group exhibitions from all over the world, documents of major importance in his development, letters from important personalities of the international cultural world, extracts from big names of the daily and art media, regarding his work, are they will also find in the exhibition.
A special mention: the poster of the exhibition banned in Romania from 1959 and some of the works that should have been part of that effort, carefully preserved by the artist, will complete this exhibition project.
“Art is the expression of the human spirit. Where is the soul in my work… well, it is certainly from the head and escapes through the hand… The worst possible thing for painting is to impose a form and deprive the painter of his freedom. It’s murderous, it’s murderous, it kills everything. I lived this, I had to go through this… Everything I have to say is said through my painting. There are two creators behind every work of art: the person who made it and the person who looks at it. Painting is an invitation to discovery and surprise, from which anyone can see and take anything they need to carry with them on their own journey through life”, said Samy Briss about his artistic creed!
The exhibition will remain open to the public until August 6, 2023, from Wednesday to Sunday, inclusive, between 10:00 and 17:00. The last entry ticket will be issued at 16:30.
Content and photo source – MACN
Published in https://portal.revistatimpul.ro/expozitia-memoires-semnata-samy-briss/