Ion Grigorescu’s diaries from the crucial years of 1970 to 1975 are a small literary and art-historical sensation. It not only corrects the facile reading of Grigorescu’s practice in the context of Conceptual art and performance, but provides insight into the artist’s multifocal thinking, which incorporates an original critique of modernism, the dystopian effects of an instrumentalized idea of reason and rationality, and an analysis of subjectivity.

The book is dedicated to Romanian artist Geta Bratescu, one of the most remarkable personalities of the Eastern European postwar avant-garde. The main part of the publication comprises visual materials and texts written by the artist that span several decades of her activity, outlining the exceptional manner in which she has appropriated the lesson of modernism and interrelated it with conceptual challenges.

The Brancusi Effect begins with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Cited as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, the exhibition and publication collect Brancusi’s original photographic documentation. The installation reflects the recent currency of the sculptural within contemporary art while referencing Brancusi’s sensibility.