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P420 is pleased to announce "Armature", the first solo exhibition by Ana Lupas (1940, Cluj, RO) in a private gallery. Following the major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2024), and the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2024–2025), this exhibition offers a new opportunity to reconsider the work of one of the most radical figures of Eastern European conceptual avant-garde.The exhibition title, deliberately left in Italian, plays on a crucial linguistic specificity and a double semantic register. The term "armatura" simultaneously evokes two key notions in Lupas’s practice: the load-bearing structure—an internal, skeletal support, corresponding to the English "armature"—and the protective shell, or armor, that shields from external threat.
The entire exhibition revolves around this necessity to support and protect what is vulnerable. Whether addressing collective memory or individual identity, Ana Lupas responds to the threat of erasure with solid, enduring devices of protection.
This defensive stance materializes, on the one hand, in monumental metal works, which Lupas uses to encapsulate and sustain organic, rural materials. Here, armatura functions as a structural framework capable of preserving the ephemeral and transforming fragile, perishable tradition into an enduring monument. Similarly, in series such as "Self-Portrait, 200", by graphically intervening on her own features and disrupting mechanical repetition, Lupas erects a barrier against standardization. Identity is not offered as a commodified, uniform image; rather, it appears armored by the graphic mark—a public image that, even as it multiplies, defends the irreducibility of the private self through variation and manipulation.
Armature thus unfolds as a journey through the strategies of resistance concentrated in Ana Lupas’s practice, celebrating art’s capacity to become shelter, armor, and structural support—an armature through which to survive history.
With a critical essay by Sara De Chiara
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Via Azzo Gardino 9, 40122 Bologna, Italy, Via Azzo Gardino, 9, 40122 Bologna BO, Italia, Bologna, Italy
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
