Umea Prototype, 1999–2000
Corten steel with silver birch treesAlways wanted to plant steel beams in a forest. A man-made structure confronting nature, and with it, many questions. A foreign body and a mineral in the vegetal world. Or a manufactured order in the perfect chaos. Umea was ravaged from fires few times in its history. Bringing Silver Birch trees from afar and planting them as a protective belt seamed to be the reasonable man-made solution to the problem. Fighting gravity while connecting issues, another struggle.
Born in Bucharest, Romania 1951, died in 2012. Lived and worked in New York. Several national and international exhibitions, notably; The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1983, Documenta VIII, Kassel 1987, Geementemuseum, Den Haag 1992, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1993, Henri Moore Foundation Leeds, 1994, Venice Biennale 1999, Zoobrücke, Köln 2000, Kunstmuseum Bern 2007, Magazzino d´Arte Moderna, Rome 2008, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2010 and the Biennale of Sydney 2010.