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Life of artist Corneliu Petrescu + Launch of Tyler Fellowship

Held on the 18th May 2023

at 3pm to
5pm

, Online


Add to Calendar 2023-05-18 15:00:00 2023-05-18 17:00:00 Australia/Sydney Life of artist Corneliu Petrescu + Launch of Tyler Fellowship Guest lecture: On the life of artist Corneliu Petrescu (1924-2009) + Launch of Tyler Fellowship Zoom
Venue:

Zoom

Summary:

Guest lecture: On the life of artist Corneliu Petrescu (1924-2009) + Launch of Tyler Fellowship


image of tyler presentationCorneliu Petrescu’s Artworks in the Context of the Tyler Collection: a Cross-regional Trans-Ideological Friendship during the Cold War

In this virtual public presentation, scholar Caterina Preda discusses the case of the Romanian artist Corneliu Petrescu (1924-2009) and his atypical experience as an artist who could travel freely to the West while living under a totalitarian regime in Romania. The key to this partial freedom was Petrescu’s friendship with an Australian-born collector, Geoffrey Tyler, who worked for the International Monetary Fund in Washington and oversaw the Romanian file. Visiting Bucharest in the mid-1970s, Tyler discovered Petrescu’s artworks and began a great friendship that lasted until the end of their lives.

Preda explores Petrescu’s artworks and unpacks how this kind of unexpected cross-regional and trans-ideological connection was possible, through using concepts such as the “Nylon Curtain” (Péteri 2004), and by clarifying several aspects related to the rich triangular Tasmanian-Romanian-United States relationship.

About the speaker:

Caterina Preda, PhD, Habil. is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest where she teaches undergraduate courses on Latin American politics, Art and politics, and a graduate course on Cultural memory in South America and Eastern Europe. Her research is interdisciplinary and deals with art in dictatorships, artistic memory in post-dictatorships in South America and Eastern Europe (Chile and Romania), cultural memory, post-communism, Latin American studies, and the visual representation of the Roma. She is the author of Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships (Palgrave, 2017). Her most recent research projects dealt with the case of the Romanian Artists’ Union (UAP), and the art and politics of memory of the dictatorship in South America and Eastern Europe” (2018-2020).

www.caterinapreda.rocaterina.preda@unibuc.ro

Tyler Visiting Fellowship

This event also marks the launch of the Tyler Visiting Fellowship, a new bi-annual residential fellowship enabling researchers, art historians, and artists to travel to Tasmania to conduct research on the Tyler Collection housed within the University of Tasmania.

Further details will be announced at the virtual event.