26/07/2026
The Longest Journey Is the Journey Home
Bogdan Nueleanu – Moving Elements
Some exhibitions mark a stage in an artist’s career, while others, beyond the works on display, acquire the significance of a return. Moving Elements, Bogdan Nueleanu’s exhibition at the “Constantin Brâncuși” National Museum in Târgu Jiu, belongs, I believe, to the latter category.
At the opening, the exhibition was discussed as being structured on three levels. This is, of course, one possible key to its interpretation. Yet, looking at the works and, above all, at the place in which they are presented, it seems to me that there is a fourth level, perhaps the most important and one that cannot be separated from the others: the return home.
Bogdan Nueleanu is originally from Gorj, lives and works in Timișoara, and his sculpture is well known on the Romanian art scene. And yet, this exhibition has an essential biographical significance: it is his first solo exhibition at home, in Gorj. From this perspective, Moving Elements can be read not only as an exhibition project, but also as the symbolic completion of a circle.
You leave in order to become. You return to see who you have become.
For a sculptor born in Gorj, however, the word “home” carries a particular weight. The return takes place in Târgu Jiu and, moreover, at the “Constantin Brâncuși” National Museum. It is almost impossible for such an encounter to remain merely geographical.
I do not believe that formal similarities with Brâncuși should be sought in Nueleanu’s sculptures. Such a comparison would be facile and, ultimately, unfair to both artists. Brâncuși need not be sought in Nueleanu’s forms. It is enough that he is present in the place to which these works have arrived.
For an artist from Gorj, Brâncuși may become a presence rather than a model. A consciousness of place. Evidence that sometimes one has to travel far from the place where one was born for that place to reveal, later on, its true significance.
This is why Bogdan Nueleanu’s metal speaks to me here less about material and more about biography. The welds, cuts, joints, industrial fragments, and surfaces that are at times raw, at times carefully finished can be seen as elements of an identity constructed over time. The artist gathers, joins, removes, preserves. In a sense, this is exactly what memory does with us.
Some sculptures retain the rigorous geometry of construction, while others approach the realm of living forms. Improbable bodies appear, along with mechanical birds, figures, silhouettes, and forms that seem at times archaic, at times to have emerged from an industrial future. Yet it is precisely this diversity that makes the exhibition difficult to reduce to a rigid scheme. The “three levels” may organize the curatorial discourse; the viewer’s experience allows them to overlap.
And perhaps this is how it should be.
Because an artist does not return home divided into chapters. He returns with everything he has accumulated between departure and return.
In this sense, the title Moving Elements also acquires, perhaps unintentionally, a biographical meaning. It is not only the elements of the sculptures that have been brought into relation with one another. The artist himself is the element that has moved. From Gorj to Timișoara, through exhibitions, encounters, and experiences, and now, through his works, back toward his place of origin.
There is a difference between exhibiting in a museum and exhibiting at home. In the first case, the work encounters an audience. In the second, it also encounters the fragility of the place from which the artist departed.
And here Brâncuși inevitably enters the conversation. Not as a term of comparison, nor as an authority beneath which contemporary sculpture from Gorj should be placed. On the contrary. Perhaps the most natural form of respect for Brâncuși’s legacy is precisely not to imitate him. To return home with one’s own artistic language.
Bogdan Nueleanu returns with his metal, his enigmatic figures, his geometry and his visual imaginary, with the experience of a sculptor who has built his artistic path far from his native place.
For me, therefore, Moving Elements is not merely an exhibition of sculpture. It is an exhibition about the distance between departure and return.
An artist leaves Gorj.
The years build a road between him and his native place.
Then, one day, the works make the journey back.
And they arrive home.
In Gorj. In Târgu Jiu. At Brâncuși’s.
Perhaps this is the true element in motion.
