Stefan Bertalan Untitled (Knospenfigur), 1986-1987

Initially a driving force of the Romanian neo-constructivist avant-garde, Ştefan 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 a interconnected cosmology of all things.

The artist’s 1981 move from Timișoara where he had originally developed his art, engaged with other artists and taught at University to the much smaller town of Sibiu initiated what Erwin Kessler has called an “inner emigration” that began long before the actual departure from Romania to Germany in 1986. The loss of his artistic context and the isolation of the new environment intensified the artist’s retreat to observation of the natural world and even to an identification with nature. Initiated by a series of intense dreams, to which the artist referred as apparitions, Bertalan began a series of emotionally charged drawings charged that insert the artist’s body into those of plants, creating hybrid formations.