Projects 85: Dan Perjovschi

NEW YORK, April 11, 2007—The Museum of Modern Art presents Projects 85: Dan Perjovschi, WHAT HAPPENED TO US?, a site-specific wall drawing for the east wall of The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, as part of the Museum’s ongoing Projects series. For his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Perjovschi (Romanian, b. 1961)—who has transformed the medium of drawing, making it an object, a performance, and an installation—will spontaneously draw witty and incisive social and political images in response to current events, allowing global and local affairs to inform the final result. Beginning on April 19, he will start drawing on the wall while the Museum is open to the public, allowing visitors to observe the creation of the work. The project is accompanied by a free newspaper created by the artist. A discussion with the artist about his work will be held on April 25 in The Celeste Bartos Theater. Projects 85, on view May 2 through August 27, is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

“Perjovschi’s sketches and skits portray reality with a sense of criticality and pointed humor. Using concise phrases and wordplay, he employs textual puns in his work. This is clear in the work's rhetorical title, WHAT HAPPENED TO US?, in which ‘US’ may refer to either the pronoun ‘us’ or the noun ‘United States of America’,” states Ms. Marcoci.

In the last decade, Perjovschi’s drawing installations have focused on recording history as a flux of events. His satirical works, which often incorporate previously drawn images with new ones, address such topics as the position of Eastern Europe in a post-Cold War world, the Israel and Palestine conflict, the power dynamic between the United States and the European Union, issues of censorship, and the artist’s identity in society.

Perjovschi, who lives and works in Bucharest, Romania, has exhibited widely throughout Europe, with recent shows at Tate Modern in London (2006), Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2006), and Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2005). He has also shown in the Sharjah Biennial (2007), Moscow Biennial (2007), Istanbul Biennal (2005), and the Venice Biennale (1999). In 1991, he joined 22, the Bucharest-based weekly oppositional paper, as the publication’s political illustrator and art director. Perjovschi received a MFA from George Enescu Conservatoire of Fine Arts, Iasi, Romania, in 1985. His drawings and artist’s books are represented in MoMA’s collection.

ABOUT THE CURATOR Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, has organized a number of exhibitions at MoMA including Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making (2007, currently on view); New Photography 2006: Jonathan Monk, Barbara Probst, Jules Spinatsch (2006); the retrospective Thomas Demand (2005); Projects 82: Mark Dion Rescue Archaeology (2004); Projects 80: Lee Mingwei—The Tourist (2003); Projects 73: Olafur Eliasson—Seeing Yourself Sensing (2001); and Counter-Monuments and Memory, part of Open Ends (2000). In addition, Ms. Marcoci cocurated (with Klaus Biesenbach) the exhibition Take Two. Worlds and Views: Contemporary Art from the Collection (2005). She is currently working on a survey exhibition of Olafur Eliasson’s work scheduled to open at MoMA and P.S. 1 in April 2008. Ms. Marcoci holds a Ph.D. in Twentiethcentury Art History and Criticism from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In addition to the publications accompanying her exhibitions, Ms. Marcoci has written widely on modern and contemporary art.

DAN PERJOVSCHI TO CREATE SITE-SPECIFIC WALL DRAWING FOR MoMA’S PROJECTS SERIES Drawings on Atrium Wall Will Reflect Current Social and Political Events Projects 85: Dan Perjovschi WHAT HAPPENED TO US? May 2–August 27, 2007 The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor

Projects 85:
Dan Perjovschi
Kurator: Roxana Marcoci