Ranging from performance to printmaking and everything in between, Geta Bratescu’s work dispels the boundaries between art and life. The Romanian artist creates artworks using everyday objects such as cigarette papers, teabags and wooden stirrers, and explores her hidden emotions and conflicts through drawings produced with her eyes closed. Having spent most of her life living and working under an oppressive political regime, Bratescu is interested in how the studio can be used as a space for personal contemplation and reflection, as well as questions of identity, ethics and femininity.
One of the first representatives of conceptualist approaches in Romania, Geta Brătescu’s oeuvre comprises drawing, collage, textiles, photography, experimental film and performance. In her seven-decade career, she has published a number of books documenting her daily studio activities and personal experiences of art and travel.
Brătescu spent much of her working life in Bucharest under the Communist regime. She developed a deeply personal practice concerned with themes of identity, gender and dematerialisation. Her aesthetic – lo-fi, handmade, incorporating inexpensive, everyday materials – evolved from an attitude towards her studio as a safe environment of enclosure as well as a stage for playful invention. Memorialised in a key film, ‘The Studio’, 1978 was a room of her own in which she could create work independently.
Geta Bratescu: The Studio: A Tireless, Ongoing Space. Camden Arts Centre, London, 7 April – 18 June 2017,
