kurimanzutto is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Rumanian artist Marieta Chirulescu in Mexico. After her recent participation in the group show everywhere and on everything –a project by Andrzej Przywara in 2012- she returns to the gallery to present, from November 9th until December 14th, a selection of new works produced in mixed techniques that involve printing and photocopying.

The work of Marieta Chirulescu is the result of the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the format and the visual contingency of her primary medium: the painted canvas. Using a distinct abstract pictorial language that references the formalism of Colour Field Painting, yet with a spare palette, she superimposes an array of reproductive and digital printing techniques.

Drawing from an extensive archive of imagery, Chirulescu repeatedly scans from images that range from her own photographs to those taken by her father during the Rumanian dictatorship, and through to computer screen-shots or technical irregularities that occur throughout the scanning processes. Chirulescu uses advanced technologies of reproduction to bring out the originals from the sediment of photocopies. By copying the empty underside of the scanner lid or a glass plate placed on the photocopier, her pieces retain the rectilinear frame of reference that conditions our way of seeing and understanding the world, and that typifies every painting, window, mirror, house or book. While preserving the frame and the grid, Chirulescu also eliminates most of the identifiable referents within it.

The subjects of her work are not the elemental part and protagonists of the real world, but the afterimages and reflections of the “mechanical unconscious” of scanners and copy machines. They are, even, the records of instantaneous events such as digital errors of image-processing software.

Rather than making images, Chirulescu “takes” pictures and presents them as ready-mades. Through his work she mixes, arranges and rearranges bits of visual information to produce imageries that disrupt, question and speculate on the inherencies and function of painting, and that reflect (on) the process of their making.