solo presentation at ART BASEL HONG KONG with CLC Gallery Venture, Beijing​

​

For Art Basel Hong Kong 2023, CLC Gallery Venture proposes "Postcards from Paradise", a solo
presentation by Romanian artist Cristian Răduță (1982, Bucharest), showcasing the artist’s latest series
of statues.

Known for sculpting fantastical, anthropomorphized animals and figures in aluminium for more than a
decade, Răduță has developed in the last decade an artistic practise that proposes novel and playful
ways in which organic and animal beings are re-configured. Colourful, animate, agile and bricolage-like,
the rabbits, foxes, turtles, flamingos, penguins, rhinoceroses, mammoths and even skeletal dinosaurs
are ever-ready to pounce, to prey, or to live and work as a Mary Poppins, a keen skier, or as an art
handler with a trusty trolley. The abstract, cartoonish and immediately recognisable sculpted forms of
the animals charged with cultural and political references contribute to the spontaneous growth of an
uniquely haphazard community, in contrast to another community Răduță continues to nurture over the
years: a looming arsenal of rockets, missiles, spacecrafts that revisits the modern idea of
monumentality, the history of super human aerial and outer space military endeavours, and Cosmist
ideals and realities. The two strands of sculptural practise - one adorable, organic and innocently
domestic, the other cold, technological and potentially destructive - pertain comprehensively to the host
of challenges and crises the world is facing in the 21st Century.

After the success of the solo exhibition "Waiting List" at CLC Gallery Venture in 2021, Răduță presents
for the " Postcards from Paradise " a group of ten statues — a panther, an elephant and a fish, among
others — that walk hurriedly, carrying under their arms, wings and fins an image of their place of origin.
Before the doomsday then, the animals try to escape while holding on to a memorabilia that reminds
them of their favourite scenes. The series comments as much on the certainly lost past, as on the
absolutely unknown future.