Artist Spotlight - Mircea Cirtog — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

Biography

From the serene streets of Craiova to the dynamic art scenes around the world, Mircea Cirtog’s artistic journey highlights the profound impact of diverse cultural influences. Growing up under the restrictions of a communist regime, Cirtog's early encounters with art were shaped within his family.

His parents, instrumental in nurturing his artistic sensibility, introduced him to the world of art through visits to museums and cultural events, which sparked his curiosity and imagination. His mother, a passionate collector of art books, created a home environment where art was not just appreciated but woven into daily life, fueling his growing passion for creativity.

Cirtog’s formal education became the foundation for his craft. An art-focused high school set him on the path of painting, and his time at the University of Fine Arts and Design Ioan Andreescu in Cluj-Napoca broadened his focus to graphic design. His academic journey transcended national boundaries when he pursued a Master’s in Fine Arts at the University of Sunderland in the UK.

This shift from the traditional, post-communist art education to the progressive, cutting-edge environment of Western academia represented a pivotal moment in his artistic evolution. It invited Cirtog to blend and contrast different art traditions, leading to a more expansive and nuanced approach to his work.

He is currently attending doctoral school at the National University of Art in Bucharest, researching digital art with his thesis Digital Pop or the Work of Art in the 21st Century.

Artist Statement

I am an artist who works in a variety of media. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, I touch various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognised, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.

My artworks question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, I make works that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide.

Through my work I attempt to examine the phenomenon of Popular culture as a methaphorical interpretation of both Kitsch and Fashion. These artwork takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues. By using popular themes such as sexuality, consumerism and violence, my artworks reference post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system. I deconstruct the American dream, fairy tales, and memes.

My works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By examining the ambiguity and origination via retakes and variations, I create with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.

Sometimes my works appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing. My works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image.

By parodying mass media, by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, I touch various overlapping themes and strategies. By engaging in semiotic and contextual analysis I can examine how social, ideological, political, rituals, religious, symbolic, economic, aesthetic, communicative and technological factors have affected, form and function.

My works are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role. My practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for manoeuvring with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of art: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination.

By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, I try to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.

https://mirceacirtog.wordpress.com/author/mirceacirtog/
https://artuk.org/discover/artists/cirtog-mircea-b-1981
https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/interview-mircea-cirtog
https://www.modernism.ro/2015/04/29/mircea-cirtog-selfie-atelier/
https://www.facebook.com/mircea.cirtog/ https://vimeo.com/user14919731