Page 38 - Studio International - July August 1971

Letter from [A major exhibition of contemporary Rumanian
art is at the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh,
Bucharest from 21 August to 11 September.]

Radu Varia

Ion Bitzan (b. 1924) epitomizes in his evolution
the searching spirit characteristic of the evolution
of Rumanian art since 1967. To some extent
his name represents all its impulses and
contradictions, its imperative need to involve
itself with the concerns of international art, as
well as to express specific values. Dominated
by the urge to search, which often leads him to
give up methods that would bring him material
success, he remains an artist of peculiar subtlety.
His exhibition of collages and drawings,
opened in October 1967 on the occasion of the
first International Colloquium on Constantin
Brancusi, puzzled many : it was the first
exhibition of abstract art to be held in
Bucharest. In another exhibition in January
1970, Bitzan exhibited a simple form, repeated
as a leitmotif in different techniques and
materials —watercolour, sculpture, luxury
objects made from perfectly wrought and
polished metal, as if they were useless jewels
placed in elegant leather boxes. One of the
pieces exhibited was a wide sleeve, into which
you put your arm and by the sense of touch
could perceive the same form, the same leitmotif
that the eye had seen in a multitude of graphic
and spatial hypostases in the same exhibition.
This exhibition caused even more surprise

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