Aurel Vlad, born on 1954 at Galati, Romania, graduated  the Arts Institute “Nicolae Grigorescu” in Bucharest, Romania, and in 2004 he becomes Doctor in Visual Arts within the National University of Arts Bucharest, Romania.

The sculptor Aurel Vlad, an outstanding representative for the generation of the 1980’s, developed in the last decades one of the most coherent and major artistic project. Showing his interest regarding a careful investigation of human being behavior on the edge, Aurel Vlad’s sculpture develops an emotion and often anxiety that actively questions the viewer. When you view a sculpture made by Aurel Vlad you cannot remain indifferent, you cannot stop yourself to react, you cannot stop asking yourself who we are and where did we come from.

The Expressionist gesture sculpture of Aurel Vlad disturbs and at a same time seduces the viewer. Aurel’s Vlad characters represent the world, a world without reference points, and a world that only through the power of self-questioning can be redeemed. Deciphering the sculpture of Aurel Vlad means that the viewer activates a consciousness belonging to anguishes that he pervaded to the depths.

Aurel Vlad’s characters are former victims, who have passed the experience of torture and physical and psychological pain, transformed into emblems, icons of the martyrs, purified by suffering (example statuary group “Procession of the Sacrificed” at the museum ”Memorial of the Victims of Communism & Anticommunist Resistance”, Sighetul Marmatiei, Romania).

Aurel Vlad’s man is not an individual in the crowd, doesn’t individualize, he lives in the crowd, he identifies himself with the crowd. The crowd becomes a leitmotif and also a pretext. The symbolic dimension of his crowds brings into question once again the modern man. The greatness of his work lies in the narrative – metaphorical dimension of the developed constructions. It is about symbolical crowds, archetypes and ritual gestures. This organic structure is the one that creates an intermission, an integration and at the same time to a disconnection from the crowd. It is about a journey in two ways, either from crowd to the individual or from the individual to the crowd.

Aurel Vlad collaborates with Anaid Art Gallery since 2012.

CV Aurel Vlad en