Every six weeks the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles invites a young emerging artist to present her/his works. Artist of the month in March through April is Romanian-born Cristian Gheorghiu (aka SMEAR).  Opens March 22 @ 8pm.

5820 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 101; @ 8:00 pm walk and tour of exhibition at the Goethe-Institut

"Cristian Gheorghiu's (aka SMEAR) visceral, highly personal style of painting emulates the messy workings of the total-information age, layering forms and images with powerful, slashing brush strokes of rhythmic, unifying admixtures and improvised, frenzied lines coupled with brilliant color to achieve a simplified language. Gheorghiu counters his free, muscular brushstrokes by loading his paintings with rags and tatters of cloth, reproductions, fragments of comic strips, and other collage elements of waste and discarded materials to convey maps of mental states.

Wrestling with ways to make a mark despite the dismaying potency of mediated imagery and the inescapable codes of representation, Gheorghiu paints in two or more styles at once, often in the same painting, denying the absolute rightness of any canon of beauty or truth, scavenging and mingling imagery almost as promiscuously as the media. Picking and adding ingredients to his taste he works the surfaces over with paint in the characteristic, spontaneous gestural language of action painting."
From "The Art of SMEAR"