Ivan Gallery

Ivan Gallery and Voloshyn Gallery will collaborate on a joint presentation of works by artist Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska and Simona Runcan (1942–2007).

About the Gallery
Ivan Gallery opened in 2007 as a private initiative in the still young Romanian gallery scene. The gallery’s program started with local, Eastern European artists - be it established ones, such as Geta Brătescu, Paul Neagu, Lia Perjovschi or, more recently, Ion Grigorescu, as well as emergent ones - the duos Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Cristina David, Ștefan Sava or Iulia Toma - aiming at making available their works and projects to a broader, international audience. We also represent Romanian artists living and working abroad, such as Bartha Sandor or Mădălina Zaharia, alongside foreign artists, such as Elijah Burgher, Ross Taylor, and Jaro Varga. The gallery’s focus has been on supporting the career of artists with an articulate, conceptual artistic discourse, while at the same time documenting and exhibiting internationally the conceptualist and experimental practice of insufficiently known Romanian artists active in the second part of the 20th century, such as Horia Bernea, Simona Runcan, and Florina Coulin.

About the presentation 
Ivan Gallery and Voloshyn Gallery’s joint presentation will pair paintings by the young Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska with those of the late Romanian artist Simona Runcan (1942–2007). Life next to death is a recurring theme in Shahmuradova’s recent work, produced against the background of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Human faces and bodies dissolve and morph into new forms, enmeshed with references to the paranormal. A selection of Runcan’s works from the Interior, Icons, Inclinations series of 1998–2003 attest to her multivalent understanding of space. The compositional strangeness of these invented rooms, or sections of rooms, highlights a major conceptual wellspring of Runcan’s work: the thematization of the image itself. The artist’s neo-avantgarde practice was marginalized under the state-controlled Communist artistic system and has been rediscovered posthumously since 2016.