Works
About
Marilena Preda Sânc’s exhibition at Gaep offers a compelling insight into a decisive decade of artistic resistance and introspection. Presenting works from the 1980s – including collages, drawings, and photographs –, it highlights a body of work created in one of the most restrictive periods of Romanian history. In this crucial decade, Preda Sânc forged her distinctive visual language through groundbreaking series such as Modules, featuring architectural structures marked by precarious balance and geological inspiration, and Bodyscape, a sequence of nude self-portraits interlaced with abstract drawings that position the body as a “unit of measure for reality” – a sort of feminist reinterpretation of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. By embracing abstraction as both an aesthetic strategy and a form of resistance, the artist carved out spaces of inner freedom within an oppressive political context.
The works on view reveal the interplay between corporeal and spatial dimensions in her practice, while also anticipating the ecofeminist concerns that resonate in today’s global discourse. From her early engagement with feminism, nature, and power structures, Preda Sânc’s 1980s works stand out as both historical documents and ongoing meditations on the human condition – urgently relevant to our present times. As she states here: “I see ecofeminism as vital for shaping a local/global ecomind, toward a universal religion of peace and humanity.”
— Anna Daneri
Anna Daneri: Your exhibition at Gaep focuses on works from the 1980s – primarily collages, drawings, photographs, and silkscreen prints. It’s the same creative period shown in the Back to the Future section at Artissima, which I curated in 2017 and where you were awarded the Special Mention. It is a real pleasure and an honor for me to have this dialogue and revisit that crucial decade in your practice. During Ceaușescu’s regime, you chose abstraction as your main artistic language. How did the political climate shape your decision to work with abstract forms, and what kinds of challenges or freedoms came with that choice?
Marilena Preda Sânc: Communist ideology, with its coercive system, could not fully penetrate the intimacy of the artistic process. There was this duality – inner freedom on one side, and a restrictive socio-political context on the other – that pushed the artist toward introspection, keen observation, retreat into nature, nature as subject and the being as consciousness. The body, in turn, became a medium.
AD: In your Modules series from the ’80s, the architectural structures seem to be in a precarious balance, marked by cracks and fractures. Can you take us inside the conceptual process behind these works, and how they mirrored your experience of living and making art at that time in history?
MPS: The first work in the series dates from 1979, alongside several rock studies/drawings. I was fascinated by the earth’s interior, by caves, by the idea of reconstructing landscapes and imagining possible states of geological matter. I had studied piano for several years, so I was attuned to musical structures, and that influenced my approach to creating visual compositions with a sense of sound. I built a world of forms – apparently abstract – that opened up metaphysical spaces where the spirit could be free. For me, these works became a way to withdraw and to hold on in an oppressive, ideologically coercive world.
AD: The Bodyscape series of collages creates a fascinating dialogue between your nude photographs and marker drawings that echo the modular structures from the aforementioned series. How did you develop the idea of the body as a “unit of measure for reality,” and what did it mean, in the ’80s, to use the image of your own body in your work?
MPS: Bodyscape emerged naturally. I was a woman living, feeling, observing, and thinking critically. My body became an interface between the inner landscape and the outside world. In many images, the body’s posture, through gesture and word,appears bound, expressing a state of existential helplessness shaped both by the human condition and by the totalitarian communist society I was living in.
In 1980s Romania, nude photography was not accepted. I managed to exhibit a few images from the Bodyscape series internationally through Mail Art events, because sending photographs by post in envelopes was subject to less censorship.
AD: Looking back at that period, how do you see the relationship between the different mediums you were working with – painting, collage, drawing – and how did those early explorations of the spatial relationships between abstract and organic forms lay the groundwork for your later ventures into video and performance?
MPS: From the very start, I embraced a diversity of techniques and artistic mediums, seeing the choice of medium as essential to the sensory and conceptual depth of the message. The living world, for me, meant both human and nonhuman, bound together in a symbiotic whole full of interstitial connections. Collages, photo-actions, photographs with interventions, and images from artist books often became paintings and, later, after 1990, projections in media installations, video works, and performances.
AD: Some of the works in the exhibition bear titles like The Androgyne and My Body Is Space in Space, Time in Time, and Memory of All. The latter seems to approach the body both spatially and temporally. How does this idea of the androgynous body connect with the notion of the body as a “unit of measure for reality,” and what does adding a temporal dimension bring to your understanding of corporeal space?
MPS: In my work, the living body contains spatial, temporal, and sensory realities – the Reality. Androgyny embodies unity, balance, and harmony, born out of tensions and contradictions, from the struggle of opposites – the Being capable of embracing its purpose and moving toward transcendence.
AD: One incredible work on paper references Sylvia Plath’s poem I Am Vertical, in which the poet expresses a preference for the horizontal over the vertical position. “But I would rather be horizontal,” she begins her meditation on mortality and desire. How did this literary reference inform your work, particularly in relation to the androgynous body, and what kind of dialogue do you see between Plath’s exploration of bodily posture and your own investigation of gender fluidity and spatial relationships?
MPS: I discovered Sylvia Plath’s poetry while working on the Modules and Bodyscape series. Her verses held images that resonated with my own work. I relived sensations, traveled visually through a world that felt familiar to my senses. I paired certain verses with existing images from my own practice that seemed to echo them. In the large-scale drawing Androgin, I chose the vertical as the link between body and transcendence. For me, bodily attitudes and color have always been languages in themselves – carriers of meaning.
We coexist in the present alongside the past and future. Conceptually, I see introspection and immersion in nature and society as moments (Zeno) in a continuous flow (Panta Rhei).
AD: In 1974, the French thinker, author, and activist Françoise d’Eaubonne drew a connection between the exploitation of nature and the subjugation of women, coining the term “ecofeminism.” In her essay Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death), she argued that the struggles of environmentalism and feminism are closely linked, because patriarchy is responsible both for environmental disasters (through overproduction and capitalist logic) and for women’s subjugation (through the appropriation of their bodies). These intersectional concepts are very contemporary and resonate deeply with your own statement: “By integrating traditional forms and new means of artistic expression, my works investigate the body/mind/soul/behaviors in relation to nature and the socio-political space, and explore – through an ecofeminist lens – feminist issues of gender/ageism/woman as leader.” Can you say more about these connections, from the perspective of today’s struggles and perhaps the future?
MPS: I’ve written about Romanian feminism, which I see as ecofeminism in its early phase, in the 1970s and ’80s – when existential questions about women’s place in a historically male-led society were explored and expressed in less aggressive visual forms, infused with love, care for others, and an ethics of living, all in the pursuit of equality and balance. For me, “ecofeminism” aligns more closely with ecomind – a clean, ethical consciousness.
As a human being, artist, and professor, I witness a contemporary world that is unequal, often violent, and still predominantly phallocratic. It feels natural to respond with critical visual reflections in some of my works. In a fluid world with multiple truths, collateral damage, and discriminatory policies that overlook humanity, multiculturalism, and multiethnicity – and that still proposes war as a core ideology – I see ecofeminism as vital for shaping a local/global ecomind, toward a universal religion of peace and humanity.
