Artists

Stefan Bertalan

Press release

Stefan Bertalan was a pivotal figure in the history of post-war Romanian art. His activities in the 1960s and 1970s—as founder of the influential avant-garde groups 111 (1966-1969) and Sigma (1970-1978)—gained international recognition. Yet, despite a surge of interest in the years preceding his death in 2014, fueled by a small number of artists and art historians Bertalan had allowed entry to his studio, his remarkable later bodies of work remain largely unknown.

A driving force of the Romanian neo-constructivist avant-garde, Stefan Bertalan’s research into cybernetics and system theory informed his search for overarching patterns and systems in natural forms. Close observation of organic processes and systematic studies of shapes found in organic, vegetal, and mineral forms eventually led to the artist’s development of an interconnected cosmology of all things, constituting Bertalan’s search for a "total science" in which knowledge would be integrated into an ensemble of ethical and spiritual principles.