BATRA TROPHY GALLERY

Opening Location: Meron Gallery, 5 Horea Street, Cluj-Napoca

Date: October 16

Time: 6:30 PM

Artwork in exhibition: (from) /Vertigo… /to > Stair-way-to Heaven

triptych by © Alexandru Crișan 2021

[images: B5_Blurry Dizziness, B6_Vertigo, B7_Stairway to heaven / building: (Marchesi Antinori Winery building by Archea Associati architect, Italy)]

From the first editions until today, the trophies of the Transylvania Architecture Biennial tell the story of a community that celebrates excellence. The exhibition brings together, for the first time, all BATRA trophies from the beginning to the present, along with the proposals made this year by students of the Sculpture Department of the UAD Cluj-Napoca. The current trophies were created starting from a provocative material – concrete, made available with the support of ROMCIM – and transformed by the imagination of young artists into expressive, contemporary forms.

The exhibition is hosted by Meron Gallery, a space dedicated to contemporary art, located in the heart of Cluj, in the Blau Ullmann Palace – a place where the dialogue between creativity and the public comes to life.

The exhibition can be visited until November 10, 2025, Monday-Friday: 07:00 – 18:30, Saturday: 09:00 – 17:00, Sunday: 10:00 – 17:00.

We look forward to you discovering the objects that give BATRA its identity and looking at architecture through the filter of art. (from Batra website at: https://batra.ro/evenimente/expozitii)

Artist Bio/CV

Alexandru Crișan (b. Bucharest, Romania 1978) is a visual artist interested in the existential complementarity of objective and nonobjective forms of expression. To resolve the former, he is an architect. As far as the latter is to be unpacked, his “counter-professional” career in photography began in 2008; his paintings stand, for almost three decades, as the most intimate, borderline atavistic, acts of divulgence. Assuming that taxonomy is of any consequence, he is partial to fine-art photography and Abstract Expressionism. The eclectic nature of his projects is, therefore, a given. His photography is a direct result of compulsive visual disquisitions on impromptu portraiture, architectural equivocations, parametric manipulations, “hybrid storytelling” and evocative conservationism. Most of his long-term, open-ended photographic series – such as “Minimal White / Minimal Black“, or “Lost Highway / My Car is Your Avatar” – are meditations on loci and human perceptions. The research on and within photography gradually afforded him a surreal vision of immateriality, which he debonairly likes to describe as “tormenting several stages of a hyperrealist mise en abyme”. Since 2015, he developed quite a few “meta-projects”: “Erotoarchitecture”, “Metropoesis”, “Hortus Conclusus”, “Alex Transcends the Balkans for a Bottle of Perfume”, “Mechaniarchy” and “Shoah”, under the compelling awareness and besetting exploration of otherness and of self. Crișan’s works have been presented in over a dozen international exhibitions, have been published in over 50 peer-reviewed magazines, have received over 500 international awards and nominations, and are part of several privately owned collections and art galleries.

Links

@batra website: https://batra.ro/

@meron gallery: https://merongallery.ro/event-item/trofeele-batra-de-la-idee-la-forma/