József Klein, Thomas Ruff & Transylvania & Anatolia: National Museum of Art of Romania announces upcoming exhibition season

József Klein and the Baia Mare Art School and Flying Carpets - Thomas Ruff & Transylvania & Anatolia are two exhibitions that the National Museum of Art of Romania (MNAR) will present in its upcoming season.

Flying Carpets - Thomas Ruff & Transylvania & Anatolia explores the clash "between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global, the fusion of seemingly irreconcilable values, so relevant to our hybrid present."

Alongside a selection of 15 Anatolian carpets, dating from the 16th to 18th centuries, from the collections of the MNAR in Bucharest and the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, the exhibition presents 15 carpets by Thomas Ruff, from his d.o.pe series, named after Aldous Huxley's The Gates of Perception.

In recent years, Ruff has produced a series of carpets printed with abstract, colorful patterns that evoke "the proliferation of organic colonies, cosmic formations or ecstatic, oriental decorative fantasies." These are the result of his photographic technique of digital manipulation: he creates virtual subjects with fractal software and then renders them digitally, with a virtual camera, itself a software. In the case of the carpets, the image is printed on the fabric of a neutral, colorless carpet, chromatically impregnated with inkjet, according to a presentation of the show.

The exhibition, curated by Erwin Kessler, is open from September 18 to February 28, 2026.

The exhibition József Klein and the Art School of Baia Mare includes a wide selection of paintings, sculptures, and documents, mostly from the painter's studio, which are now part of the collection of the Baia Mara County Museum of Art. Works from MNAR, the Satu Mare County Museum, the Art Museum of Cluj, the Center for Culture, Art and Leisure in Târgu-Mureș, but also from private collections in Budapest and Paris are also included.

It is the first time that the Bucharest public has the opportunity to see 80 works by József Klein (1896 – 1945), which present the artist's work from a less-researched perspective, namely that of a member of the Baia Mare Art Colony, MNAR said

The show, curated by Alina Petrescu, head of MNAR's Modern Romanian Art Section, and Robert Strebeli, director of the Baia Mare County Museum of Art, is open from September 18 to November 30.

(Photo: Tudor Vintiloiu/ Dreamstime)