HEART
Drugs & Feelings
Teodor Graur (RO) & COADY (AUS)
31.05.2025 - 28.06.2025
vernissage
Saturday, May 31, 2025, 6-8 pm
visiting hours
Wed - Sat. 12-6 pm
Pavilion ISHO, Timișoara
Art Encounters collateral event
SANDWICH & CATENA / FILDAS ART
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HEART brings together two complementary artistic perspectives into a visual dialogue about vitality, corporeality, and the relationship between abstract and concrete—between remedy and emotion, design and symbol.
COADY presents Golden Spectra, a series of monumental acrylic sculptures—white and yellow pills that become visual meditations on human fragility and resilience. The series delves into the profound significance of the colour yellow within the tapestry of art history. Yellow, often associated with warmth, vitality, and enlightenment, has been a recurring motif in artistic expression across cultures and epochs. From the radiant glow of sunlight captured by the Impressionists to the symbolic resonance of gold leaf in religious iconography, yellow embodies a spectrum of meanings that transcend mere pigment. Through oversized acrylic pills, COADY explores the intersection of art and medicine, inviting viewers to contemplate the healing properties of colour and form.
As a counterpoint, Teodor Graur conducts a visual investigation of the everyday medical realm, using the graphic language of large-format 1980s advertisements to re-semanticize drug names familiar to an entire generation. The heart, a recurring symbol, is recast in circulation between organ, mechanism, and emotion—between what must be protected and what must be cultivated.
THE HEART - a favourite target amongst warriors, a special offering for gods, the source of energy, housing for feelings or simply a handy emoji - needs constant maintenance. Empathy, understanding, altruism, and so many more activities of the heart, alongside the classical love need, as any mechanism does, continuous exercise, supervision, and trickery.
Together, the two practices create a joint installation that explores caring for oneself and others, the body as both a political and poetic space, and the contemporary aesthetics of survival. The exhibition thus becomes an invitation to introspection—to reassess our relationship with what nurtures us, whether it is a shape, a colour, a drug name, or a gesture of empathy.
Golden Spectra: An Exploration of Light and Vitality in 2024 was COADY’s first solo show with Sandwich, after several successful collaborations. Catherine COADY is an artist based in Melbourne, whose works have been exhibited in Australia, Milan, Turin, Venice, Basel, and, more recently, Bucharest.
Teodor Graur (born 1953) is an artist who has made a lasting impact on Romanian contemporary art since the early 1980s. In his early artistic expressions, he employed performance as a means to voice his opposition to the totalitarian system of that era.
Throughout this artistic evolution, Graur has remained steadfast in his preference for installation as his primary medium of expression. His work has been showcased in prominent galleries and museums, including the MARe Museum of Recent Art (2020), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), Sandwich Gallery (2022), Sector 1 Gallery (2021), Nicodim Gallery (2016/2017), Plan B Gallery (2016) and tranzit .ro/ Bucharest (2014).
This event is part of the Program “Sandwich Grand Tour".
A cultural Program co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
The Program does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The AFCN is not responsible for the Project content of the project or the manner in which the results of the Project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient
