‘Unleashing the Sins of Sculpture’ Breaks the Canon

‘Unleashing the Sins of Sculpture’ reimagines sin as a means of disrupting the patriarchal narratives shaping the infrastructures of power and value, historical memory and aesthetic visibility. Co-curated by Cristina Vasilescu and Georgia Țidorescu, the exhibition brings together works by 19 contemporary Romanian women artists to offer a counterpoint to traditional sculpture – one that operates through instability, abjection and embodied subjectivity to expose points of rupture within the male-centred canon.

Once the headquarters of the centralized communist press, the vast building now occupied by Scânteia+ looms as a ruinous colossus haunted by its ideological past. Erupting from its tiled walls is Larisa Sitar’s We Belong Together (2024), a faux mirror of concrete-dipped foam sprouting thick tentacles, which kitschifies the austere monumentality associated with Soviet-era brutalism. Juxtaposing the rigidity of concrete with the soft pliability of foam, Sitar dismantles the authoritative logic of brutalist aesthetics with a language of intuitive, organic chaos. 

This subversive impulse continues in Andreea Anghel’s He Who Danced Like a God (2022), affixed to a nearby column. This kinky assemblage features a high-heeled shoe with a magic 8-ball nailed to a blown-up image of a factory machine, above which a French encyclopaedia, opened to the entry for the famously horny ballet L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), is pierced with a silver whip. Here, the erotic body resists subjugation to regimes of ideological and corporeal control.

High Heel Communism (2022/23), an installation by the collective The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, similarly engages with the outdated norms that govern female bodies. Six mannequins in communist-era office wear are dotted around the entrance, mirrored at the far end of the space by large-scale photographs of their real-life counterparts posing in matching outfits, evoking a factory-line logic of mass production and collapsing individuality into archetype. With a bright sartorial palette drawing from 1950s Hollywood melodramas, the work satirizes how the male gaze continues to script femininity into a consumer product.

Other works utilize grotesque maximalism to confront normative beauty ideals, such as the public installation A Totem to Frumiria (2022) by collective Apparatus 22. Composed of steel bars, bulbous mirrored globes, streams of neon text, cartoonish reflective eyes and a red leather tassel, the structure resists visual cohesion and celebrates frumiria – an invented concept of absolute beauty rooted in contradiction and multiplicity. As collective member Erika Olea explained during our studio visit, this work is intended as a ‘mindfuck’ designed to unsettle conditioned perceptions of beauty.

This logic carries into Adriana Preda’s adjacent video-sculpture, Moisturizer on Fake Leather and Cuticle Oil on Gel Nail Extensions (2025), in which the artist aggressively smears white cream across her faces, combs a wig to the sound of cracking bones and, slipping on leather gloves with insect-bedazzled nails, introduces a bloodshot-eyed doppelgänger doll. This horror take on ASMR and the neoliberal rituals of self-care traces how commodified beauty can unravel into the monstrous.

The show seeks to subvert purist sculptural principles by presenting fragile, self-reflexive works. This resonates in Ioana Nemeș’s conceptual project Monthly Evaluations (7.05.2008) (2003–10): a diaristic system of self-assessments visualized through poetic text against Pantone-coded grids, scored across five parameters: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial and luck. Here, artistic genius is reframed as a cumulative negotiation between socio-economic factors and physical constraints inflected by personal desires.

Rather than striving for purity and timelessness, the works in ‘Unleashing the Sins of Sculpture’ insist on what Walter Benjamin described in his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), as Jetztzeit – a non-linear present, enmeshing memory and historical residues – to centre the non-conforming and unruly female body both within, and in tension with, the art canon. 

‘Unleashing the Sins of Sculpture’ is on view at Scânteia+, Bucharest, until 8 May 

_{Main image: ‘Unleashing the Sins of Sculpture’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artists and Scânteia+; photograph: Dani Ghercă}