Exploring the Archive: Finding Geta Brătescu’s Magic Form

The book’s design by Belgian design studio ruttens-wille engages in another game of forms, juxtaposing Brătescu’s texts translated from Romanian alongside works playing with scale within the layout. All components together open up the ‘serious game’ of art, its concepts of her thinking about shapes and a composition’s connections to music and dance. The potential of another world opens up on the page.

The primordial forms with which God, by conceiving them, created the universe are the circle, the square, and the triangle. The circle contains, the square positions, the triangle directs. Human thought and feelings function as abstract, energetic forms of these schemata. Creators are the priests of these primordial forms. —August 2011

The drawing is a dance of three linked characters: the brain the eye and the hand. In the line of the drawing can be read the feeling and rhythm of this dance, its sensual freedom.

Drawing is a text. There are those who write with letters and those who write with drawings. I am chiefly a member of the second category. Today I wrote a man who looks at the sun. You can write this way with a pencil, with a marker pen, with scissors. Drawing is the line sailing on the white ocean of the paper. It is a sailor’s knowledge and the temptation of space.

My most recent collages employ colored paper, drawn on by means of outlines cut out using scissors. I draw using scissors, a creative gesture above academic drawing and without pencilled preliminaries. A form demands another form; there are no preconceived necessities; a form created through its energy itself creates another form and this in turn creates. —1 May 2014

The space of the paper on the surface of the drawing board: this space, in the condition of reality, is very small, but when I work, the real space gives way to the imaginary space, the space dictated by the needs of the line. To the eye, to the hand, what occurs is an unshackling, a freedom of gesture, a pleasure. The pencil, marker pen, or scissors are for me the tools of this release.

I’m working on Collages (Gluing). But before the technical phase of gluing, I have to compose the performance of forms and colors. The PERFORMANCE on the stage of the paper depends on the eye and the hand of the director, the artist. —December 2015 –

Since its founding in 1992, Hauser & Wirth Publishers has been devoted to the presentation of unique, object-like books and a rich exchange of ideas between artists and scholars. Exploring the Archive continues this commitment through the digitization of excerpts from seminal, rare, or out-of-print titles from the Hauser & Wirth Publishers archive, which comprises monographs, artists’ books, exhibition catalog, and collections of artists’ writings. A survey of Geta Brâtescu’s practice titled ‘L’art est un jeu sérieux’ is open at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen through 15 November 2020.