PAUL NEAGU – THE MONOGRAPH

The Romanian Cultural Institute in London is happy to host and support the launching event of "Paul Neagu - The Monograph", an album dedicated to the Romanian-born, UK-based artist Paul Neagu (1938–2004) which represents the first comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre at a time when his activities as an artist, both in Western and Eastern Europe, are ripe for reassessment. The event, organised by The Paul Neagu Estate (UK), features a conversation between the two editors of the work, Magda Radu and Georg Schöllhammer.

Paul Neagu settled in London in 1971, but the seeds of his artistic practice and methodology had already been planted. A versatile artist, excelling in both two and three-dimensional forms of expression, Neagu was also a performer, writer and thinker. This publication offers new interpretations of his themes and cycles of works (such as tactile art; Hyphen, his major sculptural invention; the concept of Anthropocosmos; and later projects of »visual hermeneutics«), taking into account the socio-historical and subjective factors that structured his trajectory.

Commissioned by The Paul Neagu Estate (UK), this publication appeared last year at JRP Editions is edited by Magda Radu and Georg Schöllhammer; with essays by Ivana Bago, David Crowley, Tom Holert, André Lepecki, Friedemann Malsch, Anca Oroveanu, Ileana Pintilie, Magda Radu, Yehuda Emmanuel Safran, Kristine Stiles and Diana Ursan.

Magda Radu is a curator and art historian based in Bucharest, where she founded the independent art space Salonul de Proiecte.

She is the editor or co-editor of exhibition catalogues and books Art in Romania Between 1945–2000: An Analysis from Today’s Perspective (2016), Dear Money (2014) and André Cadere/Andrei Cădere (2011). She co-curated the first international retrospective of Paul Neagu at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in 2021, the Neue Galerie/BRUSEUM Graz in 2022 and MNArT, in 2023 in Timisoara, part of TM23. She previously curated Geta Brătescu: Apparitions, the Romanian Pavilion exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, as well as exhibitions at KIOSK, Ghent; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Art Encounters Biennale, Timișoara; and the Muzeul Național de Artă Contemporană, Bucharest.

Georg Schoellhammer is an author and curator, currently editor-in-chief of the magazine springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, Vienna, which he co-founded in 1995. He lives and works in Vienna. From 2005 to 2007, he was editor-in-chief of the magazines for documenta 12, an international cooperation project of more than a hundred magazines worldwide that continued through 2009. From 1988 to 1994 he was visual arts editor for the newspaper Der Standard. In addition, Schöllhammer is head of tranzit.at and leads the research group Parallel Modernities – Architecture at the Margins of the Soviet Empire (Frankfurt/Berlin), is project director of Sweet Sixties (a joint research initiative on Late Modernism and Neo-Avant Guardes in Central and West Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East and North Africa), has co-founded the international research group Postwar Avant Gardes (Ljubljana, Barcelona, Vienna). Besides these initiatives, he also co-edited a catalogue raisonné of the Polish Artists KwieKulik (JRP/Ringier, 2013) and curated the monographic exhibition and edited the catalogue Július Koller: One Man Anti Show (MUMOK, Vienna, 2016). Schöllhammer is a member of the board of Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Bank and of the Erste Foundation in Vienna. He was co-curator of the international retrospective of Paul Neagu at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in 2021, Neue Galerie Graz in 2022 and MNArTimisoara in 2023, part of the TM23 programme.

The event will be followed by a wine reception offered by SC Daconis SRL.