Alexandru Antik, Miklós Onucsán, Eugenia Pop, Adriana Popescu, Laurențiu Ruță, Valeriu Semenescu, Ioan Sumedrea, Gábor Szörtsey and Titu Toncian studied in the ceramic, glass and metal department of the “Ion Andreescu” Arts Institute in Cluj, or they were informally connected to the department in the second half of the 1970s. It was an environment marked by experimentation with materials and processes encouraged by the young professors Ana Lupaș and Mircea Spătaru, who benefitted from the production opportunities presented by the city’s booming porcelain and faience industry. Collaborating with industrial centres proved to be very constructive, and saw the artists’ work with ceramic and glass quickly break the limits of the craft. They managed to elevate ceramic from its common perception as a “minor” or decorative art, turning it into a conceptual and process art that was characterized by their experiments with unconventional techniques and their questioning of the role of art at a time when the ideological context of the communist regime was restrictive for artists in Romania.

The current exhibition does not have a historical focus. It does not attempt to reconsider that context, nor does it trace the debut period of the artists, and it does not maintain that the group was homogenous or programmatic in any way. The works exhibited were created in different periods – some of them made for the graduation show, with others that were only just completed this year. Established processes for ceramic, glass and industrial technologies can be identified in some of the works, while in others the artists abandoned the materials used in the early years of their art and instead followed the spirit of the processes themselves.

Besides the fact that these artists started their careers around the same time, what brings them together is a certain feeling for alchemy. Although alchemy might seem a little pretentious, it is the most fitting term to define the way in which the artists in this group work to transform matter. What they do is never only ceramic or glass, rather the glass becomes stone, and therefore sculpture (Semenescu), or it acts as an archaeological material corroded by water and time (Sumedrea). In other works, walls are activated organically (Onucsán), the object is treated as a conceptual hypothesis (Antik), earth becomes body (Toncian), objects become able to act out humour (Szörtsey) or become fantastical creatures for invented rituals (Pop). And in one case light freezes liquidity in a fleeting moment (Ruță). The organic and non-organic materials used by the artists are magically transformed through graftage – the supreme form of alchemy – to become a new species of plant that has never existed before (Popescu).