GHERASIM LUCA Apatride, 1913-1994

Gherasim Luca (1913 Bucharest - 1994 Paris) was a poet and artist of Romanian origin, most of whose work was published and written in French. Considered one of the founders of Romanian surrealism, in an avant-garde atmosphere led by Tristan Tzara, Constantin Brancusi and Victor Brauner. He settled in France in 1952 and developed a singular and protean body of work.

 

An outstanding writer, described by Gilles Deleuze as "the greatest poet in the French language", Gherasim Luca is the "limit-hero" of the inventiveness of language and image, an inspired "cubomaniac" who traverses and probes the practices of poetry, photography, drawing, collage and book-objects, the inventor of "ontophony" as a new regime of poetic language and its possibilities of phonatory and visual expression.

After the Second World War, Luca explored a "non-œdipian" philosophical position and revalued the surreal dimension of art and life through the disconcerting operations of collage, montage, misappropriation and black humour, all surrealist procedures that evoke the marvellous and the disquieting.

« Cubomanie », the main series of Luca's visual work, which "makes the known unrecognisable", is a form of collage made from various photos and illustrations, but, above all, reproductions of paintings, cut into squares of equal dimensions. These squares are then glued together randomly to form a new image.

 

 

 

Collections Publiques

Centre Pompidou — Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France

CNAP — Centre National Art Plastique, Paris, France

LAM —Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut, Villeneuve d'Ascq

Musée de la Roche-sur-Yon, France   

Beaux-Arts de Paris, France

BNF — Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France

Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, Paris, France