ANA LUPAȘ:
DRAWING THE SOLEMN PROCESS

Published by
P420 Gallery
31.5 x 22.5 cm
208 + 48 pages
English
Hardcover
ISBN 978-88-98476-02-2

Price: 155 lei

Not nearly enough has been written about Ana Lupas' The Solemn Process (1964-2008), a work that was intended to last "indefinitely" and took over forty years to complete. Together with Humid Installation (1970), Monument of Cloth (1990), and the Christmas trees for the years to come (1993), The Solemn Process forms the body of monumental works in Lupas' oeuvre.

In its basic tenet, The Solemn Process was a collective action, performed by villagers at three farmsteads in the villages of Saliste and Margau in Romania, under the invitation, direction, and supervision of the artist. Drawing from ancient traditions of ceremony and ritual during harvest times, Lupas and her collaborators formed wreaths of wheat and other farm crops based on designs devised by Lupas and themselves inspired by traditional forms.

Three sets of drawings have survived that were originally produced to guide the construction of the skeletal support structures for the wreath forms, further illustrate the wire mesh skin and the knotting and binding patterns with which the wheat bales would be attached (both series dating from 1964-76), and lastly document the disintegrating wreaths when Lupas revisited the sites in the early 1980s (these drawings are dated 1980-85).

In this volume we are invited to observe a double step: one of ascent—the drawings accompanying the conception and making of the wreaths—and one of descent, focusing on their moldiness.
These two moments could be defined, on the one hand as the momentum supported by the initial project of the realization of the work, and on the other as the despair when the erosion of the wreaths revealed the intrusion of a brutal reality.

Texts by Christian Rattemeyer, Marina Lupas Collinet, Sebestyén Székely, Ioan Alexandru.