Mihaela Mihalache – solo exhibition, Space of chidhood @ Court of Justice of the European Union, Krichberg, Luxembourg
4- 20 december 2019, Gallery -2925, Salle Dalsgaard, Luxembourg
Artist statement
Spaces of childhood
This exhibition bears a suggestive name for the personal direction of the artist’s past.
It is thus a living memory that is reborn with every memory of an event or space frame from childhood.
The interior spaces in the present works aim to induce the viewer into the real world unfolded beyond the real or fictional interpretations of the imagination, namely to lead it to a space of innocence and of all possible and impossible things.
In the composition, we distinguish frames of room design, where a series of detail objects are adopted that have a special significance for the artist; as, for example, the teddy bear’s silhouette constitutes a leitmotif for all her artistic research.
Such an element, which is prevalent in most of the sketch images, consists of the living presence in the creator’s memory, of the bear toy. This so-called “accessory” of room interiors or design detail represents the motive of all the works of this exhibition.
Although the interior spaces are as familiar to the author as possible, they become extremely strange in the moment of pictorial transposition, as they take on other forms, becoming surprising even to the artist. The approach from the planning of the frames, to the effective photographic immortalization and the exact or interpreted rendering of the painting work, creates distances between the stages of these processes, leaving to the border of the impossible, the free interpretation of both the beginning, but especially the end of a work.
Often it can be photos from our own archive, where we can either find representations of showcases, or spaces taken from toy museums such as Pollock’s Toy Museum (London), or from the countless places taken in childhood trips or the artist’s past rooms, where a space or situation is particularly striking for the artist. The area (in which the photographic frame is constituted) is, for example, a wall or a floor, so that the room becomes the only way in which the actual meeting, of the artist with himself, with time, with space and with the public, takes place.
Thus the painting generating illustrations of the visions of architectural-static interior frames themselves as well as the reasonings and feelings, which make up the living and dynamic interior, of the past and concomitant of the artist’s compilation, constitutes the association with a parallel approach between the categories of the interior in reports by: real-fictional, objective-subjective, external-internal.
The plastic world develops a captive frame in its own universe, which in turn is directed to the register of reality. This justifies the approach of a creative space in which, like the world of childhood, everything is allowed. This can be said about the medium itself that serves in the work of the artist – the canvas he paints, as representing an empty space where the elements are added at the pleasure of the artist, the final composition being derived from the original composition depending on his choice.
The frames and the characters depicted in the works constitute elements with which the creator of the work relates in his own or fictional way and also meditates in their memory. Thus, in this work are represented relatives, friends, close persons, acquaintances but all included in this register.
In most of the sketch frames, the works are made up of vivid memories, the plastic illustration being realized by “holds” of the early or late childhood.
The choice of the teddy bear in the majority of the present works, is justified by an almost obsessive pleasure of the artist for them, proving itself a real own collection dating from 1995 (of the first teddy bear), which is maintained here and developed so far; both physically and on the worksheet in the pictorial register.
Mihaela Mihalache

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