Roxana Scripcaru
Head of the Romanian Postmodern & Contemporary Art Evaluation Office
74. Flyer with Parrot [1977]
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74. Flyer with Parrot [1977]
1942, Braşov
Estimate:
EUR 5.000 - 8.000
Sold
EUR 17.500
References
GUȚĂ, Adrian; PAVEL, Amelia, ”Ștefan Câlția”, Possible Gallery, Bucharest, 2004. "Stories with Ștefan Câlția", UNArte Publishing House, Bucharest, 2013. Steluța Pestrea Suciu, "Interview with the painter Ștefan Câlția", in Astra Magazine, no. 3-4, 2016.
oil on canvas, 33.5 x 33.5 cm, signed centrally, in red, "Câlția"
Ștefan Câlția tells stories with signs, lines, and shapes, creating a perfect literature of ink on paper. The grammar the artist uses is closely related to the plastic signs. Sometimes he creates in black and white, highlighting the ink and charcoal. He works meticulously and establishes a very clear geometry. For Câlția, even figurative painting can be decomposed into several elements. He takes fragments from others' stories and transforms them into a pretext for image and color. A painter of silences, the artist stakes particularly on spatiality and distances established between multiple characters in his compositions. In the economy of his creation, the character plays an essential role. However, in Câlția's work, the character should not be interpreted only through the decode of a human silhouette, but can embody a cloud, a tree, a bird, or even the background of the work. The artist presents the background as a perpetual motion and an infinite, ancestral space on which he affixes a protagonist (regardless of its origin) and builds the rest of the composition around these two elements. Ștefan Câlția reserves a central place for his protagonists on the canvas and allows them to float in an infinite universe. The artist draws inspiration from the stories built by Pieter Bruegel and from the complex compositions of Hieronymus Bosch, heading towards unusual choices with characters of reduced dimensions, placed in an ample space. Câlția's protagonists tend to rise from the earth, hypnotized by the promise of a biased perspective. In the present work, the central motif is constituted by the flyer with the parrot, a motif often encountered throughout his work. Especially in the works made in the '70s, '80s, Ștefan Câlția sharpens his brush on canvases with monochrome backgrounds and unprecedented protagonists. He opts for an overflowing chromatic and predominantly uses shades of green, blue, or red. The painting genre approached by Ștefan Câlția falls within the realistic-fantastic area. The artist takes on the role of a storyteller in images and assigns a narrative function to his painting, regardless of the subject approached.
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SESSION
Brought to you by
Roxana Scripcaru
Head of the Romanian Postmodern & Contemporary Art Evaluation Office
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