Ciprian Mureșan Romania, b. 1977

Ciprian Mureşan (b. 1977, Dej) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. Working across drawing, video, animation and sculpture, he builds his practice on copying, repetition and re-enactment. He takes images that already exist, from art history, religious iconography and the visual legacy of socialism, and runs them through his own hand. He copies entire art books and catalogues page by page onto a single sheet, until the archive becomes a dense, almost black surface where knowledge turns into exhaustion.

In his videos, iconic performances and symbolic acts are replayed in deliberately unheroic conditions. Children re-stage landmark performance art on a playground, and a child mixes Coca-Cola and Pepsi in one glass. With dark humour, these works ask what becomes of ideals and artistic myths once they are inherited rather than lived, a question shaped by his generation’s experience of post-communist Romania.

The same attention to how images and ideas are passed on guides his work beyond the studio. Since 2005 he has been an editor of IDEA art + society, after co-editing the artist-run magazine VERSION. As a curator, often working in dialogue with fellow artists, he has organised exhibitions such as At the Edge of the World for Art Encounters in Timișoara.

Mureşan represented Romania at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and later took part in the 57th Venice Biennale and the 17th Biennale of Sydney. His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and the New Museum. It is held in collections including the Centre Pompidou, Tate and SFMOMA.