TIMIșOARA.- Over 250 artworks by neo-avant garde artist Ștefan Bertalan exhibited at the Art Encounters Foundation, Timișoara in a major retrospective curated by Bernard Blistène.

Between April 3 and June 28 2025, the Art Encounters Foundation is delighted to present a major retrospective of the work of Romanian artist Ștefan Bertalan (1930-2014), entitled In Tune With The World, conceived by Bernard Blistène, Honorary Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne du Centre Pompidou-Paris.

The exhibition shows more than two hundred works by the artist. Paintings, works on paper, photographs, films, as well as a large body of documentary work and an installation entitled Inflatable structures (1974), created as a project of the Sigma group, will round off the most important exhibition to date of the protean work of this major figure of the European neo-avant-garde art scene.

Born in 1930 in the village of Răcăştia (Hunedoara County, Transylvania), Ștefan Bertalan (d. 2014) enrolled at the Ion Andreescu Academy of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca in 1956. Graduating in 1962, he was appointed Professor at the Timișoara School of Fine Arts in the same year.

In 1965, Bertalan co-founded Groupe 111 with Roman Cotoșman and Constantin Flondor, arguably the first experimental art collective in Communist Romania, soon followed by the renowned experimental and interdisciplinary group Sigma (1969-1980), which he created with Constantin Flondor and Doru Tulcan and which was joined by artists, thinkers and researchers from a variety of disciplines.

From 1970 to 1981, he taught at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the Polytechnic University in Timișoara. In 1986 he emigrated to Öhringen, near Stuttgart, Germany, where he lived and worked until 2012.

A key figure in the Romanian neo-constructivist avant-garde from the late 1950s and 1960s, Ștefan Bertalan studied overarching patterns and systems in natural forms. From the 1970s until the artist’s death in 2014, his work was informed by research into cybernetics and system theory, topics he studied starting from natural forms and organic, mineral and vegetable processes, leading him to elaborate a veritable cosmology in which man and nature are one.

Bernard Blistène (born 1955) is a French art curator who works and lives in Paris. He managed many exhibitions in France and abroad and he served as the director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris from 2013 to 2021. And since then, Honorary Director of the National Museum of Modern Art. In the present, he is the President of the “New Worlds” program of the Ministry of Culture.

The exhibition is supported by Banca Transilvania, co-financed by AFCN, and produced in collaboration with Esther Schipper Berlin/Paris/Seoul, with the support of ISHO and the French Institute in Romania, Timișoara. The exhibtion will travel to MNAC Bucharest in the autumn of 2025.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the generosity of those who made valuable works available: the Ștefan Bertalan Estate (Esther Schipper Gallery), the Brukenthal National Museum, the Ovidiu Șandor Collection, the MARe Collection/Muzeul de Artă Recentă, the Georg Lecca Collection, and Triade Foundation.