solo show at CLC Gallery Venture, Beijing, 2021

​

On the occasion of the 2021 edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing, CLC Gallery Venture was pleased to present Waiting List, Cristian Răduță’s first exhibition with the gallery, also the artist’s first solo presentation in Asia. The exhibition included Răduță’s sculptural works created in 2021 amidst the global pandemic, and in its thematic totality considers in a distinctively dark humour fashion the notion of the waiting list, as it manifests in the context of the global art market, in the ongoing global vaccine crisis, in a Beckett-ian struggle in vain, and in the continued heroic anticipation of a cosmic way out for lives on earth.

 

Known for sculpting fantastical, anthropomorphize-d animals and figures in chiefly aluminium combined with found objects, Cristian Răduță (1982, Bucharest) has developed in the last decade an artistic practice that proposes novel and playful ways in which organic and animal beings are re-constituted. Colorful, 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.

 

For Waiting List, Răduță constructs a theatrical scenario, in which a herd of sculpted animals gathers around an imposing monumental form, topped by a feline, reminiscent of either Laika, the dog that was sent into space in 1957, or of a classic Mary Poppins gesture, or of a human cannonball. The delicate and fragile nature of the situation in its totality is revealed, as the erect rocket-like centerpiece assumes the textured appearance of a bamboo. The choreographed combination of the natural-animistic and the military-technological captured in an upward and indeed outward, departing movement pertains to the titular theme of the exhibition: waiting aggressively, anxiously or carelessly, anticipating either a chance to buy, in a irreversibly capitalist system; or a chance to buyout, a salvation in the form of an extraterrestrial escape, a fantastical, magical way out of the conundrum that is the world today.