Dan Perjovschi
Dan Perjovschi, born in Sibiu, Romania in 1961, is an itinerant worker in the visual arts, his platform: the walls, windows, and floors of museums and art galleries around the world, where he translates observations from politics, media, art, and everyday life to a mixture of line drawings and graffiti.His tools are sketchbooks, markers, chalk, newspaper, and the Internet, which he uses to develop new ideograms and cartoons and stage them as large social panoramas.
The roots of his art can be traced back to the social and political transformations of his home country Romania. After the end of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, Perjovschi began drawing political cartoons for the cultural weekly Revista 22. Over the years, an extensive archive of motifs and scenes has developed that surface repeatedly in his exhibitions. Created as a rebellious art of survival, they now focus on the rituals and entanglements of a global society fixated on consumerism and material growth.
Featured at Romanian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale, 1999, a solo exhibition followed in 2005 at Musuem Ludwig, Cologne, curated by Kasper König. The artist’s numerous solo projects include The Room Drawing (Tate Modern, 2006), What Happened to US? (MoMA, 2008), All Over (Wiels, Brussels, 2008), and most recently Unframed (Kiasma Museum, Helsinki, 2013).
Despite his reputation in the international art world, Romania has remained the center of gravity in Dan Perjovschi’s thought. Besides his art, Dan Perjovschi sees it as an important task to search perspectives beyond authoritarian and anti-democratic ideologies, strengthening art’s role as a motor and driving force behind social processes. In the spring of this year, together with his wife, artist Lia Perjovschi, he was awarded the Princess Margriet Award of the European Cultural Foundation for his critical engagement.
Numerous publications include: I Draw – I Happy (2004), Postmodern Ex-Communist (2007), States of Mind (2007) and Behind the Line (2011).