miart 2025: Bucharest gallery Gaep showcases group presentation at Milan art fair

Gaep will participate at miart 2025, Milan’s international art fair, with a presentation covering two new sun prints by Răzvan Anton, assemblages by Théo Massoulier, paintings by Cătălin Pîslaru and photographs by Mihai Plătică.

A common thread running through these artists’ practices is a desire to push the boundaries of their mediums of choice, either by developing hybrid forms or by integrating industrial materials with traditional ones, the gallery explained.

This is Gaep’s seventh participation at miart, which gathers this year 179 galleries from 31 countries.

For his works, situated at the border between drawing and photography, Răzvan Anton uses a distinctive sun printing (heliographic) technique. He starts by scribbling paper sheets with a blue ball pen, then places a transparent screen with the found image on them and, finally, exposes them to sunlight for weeks or months. The two archival images on which the works for miart are based are stills from super 8mm films shot by the artist’s father in the 1970s and 1980s.

Théo Massoulier’s work is centered on hybrid structures. In the ‘5G’ series of sculptures, the French artist synthesizes minerals and plants with scraps of human technē. Massoulier is particularly interested in the autonomy of modern machines and devices, which have their own ways of processing information and communicating with one another and their environment without a human agent, and in the humans’ emotions towards self-aware automatons.

The Chișinău-born, Düsseldorf-based artist Cătălin Pîslaru sketches his compositions digitally and builds them by hand with delicate lines that meet pigment-thick shapes. The results preserve the neatness of the digital visual language but also show the marks of classic painting techniques. Forgoing canvas, he experiments with materials such as HPL panels.

Mihai Plătică’s recent body of work is inspired by the “Harvard Computers” – the women hired beginning in 1881 to study the Harvard Observatory’s photography collection. The works selected for miart are either directly connected to this collection (the photogravures on iron plates that replicate old images of stars) or build upon the idea of making the invisible visible through full-spectrum photography and photoelasticity.

Gaep’s booth will be on view from April 4 to April 6 at Allianz MiCo Central.

(Photo: Răzvan Anton, Fading Study (man holding hand in front of camera), 2024; courtesy of the artist and Gaep)