ALEXANDRU CHIRA
b. 1947, Tăușeni, Romania
d. 2011, Bucharest, Romania
WORKS | BIOGRAPHY | EXHIBITIONS | PUBLICATIONS
SELECTED WORKS
BIOGRAPHY
Alexandru Chira, who used to sign his works ALCHIRA, was born in 1947, in a tiny Transylvanian village near Cluj. He attended art school in Cluj and then the Fine Arts Institute in Bucharest. His home village Tăușeni suffered from a long drought. Chira began to intensively develop a quasi-magical system through which extreme weather situations could be acted upon. He withdrew completely into a visionary inner world to design a landscape monument that would serve as a cosmic-energetic receiving and transmitting station and symbolic totemic arrangement to mysteriously affect weather phenomena and soil conditions. Completely obsessed with this task, he neglected family and friends to develop a hardly intelligible visual language necessary for it in sketches, drawings, paintings, and sculptures.
In the 1990s, when he was already a university professor and a recognized artist, he succeeded in fulfilling this lifelong dream, which, in his typical narcissistic self-aggrandizement, he considered the biggest and best thing any man or artist had ever dared to tackle. On a hill outside Tăușeni, Alexandru Chira created an ensemble of enigmatic poetic structures reminiscent of a sculpture garden left behind by aliens as a cosmic riddle to earthlings.
His drawings and paintings are completely wrapped around this visionary guiding principle of his life. Chira's works transport the essence of a compact core of centripetal idiosyncratic condensation of a wide range of ideas from imbued by the far-reaching perimeter of ufology, shamanism, the esoteric content of religions, from gnosis and practical magic. Some of them are reminiscent of impossible metaphysical machines that seem to belong to a very peculiar eccentric space between the earthly and the spiritual.
SELECTED PERSONAL EXHBITIONS
2019 Alexandru Chira - Into the Land Lab, Delmes & Zander, Cologne, Germany, Nov 9 – Jan 1, 2020
2018 Alexandru Chira, Delmes & Zander at Independent NY, New York (US)
2015 Retrospektive, The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest (RO)
2007 Pre-text, Luchian 12 Gallery, Bucharest
1998 Earth and Art, Romanian Museum of Agriculture, Slobozia, Romania
1993 De-semnul interior (‘Inner De-sign’) House of Culture, Bratislava, State Museum, Nitra, Slovakia
De-semnul interior , (retrospective), Cluj-Napoca Museum of Art, Romania
De-semnul interior , (retrospective) Bistriţa Museum of Art, Romania
1984 Romanian Cultural Center in New York, USA;
1982 Studies for an Exhibition, Simeza Gallery, Bucharest, Romania;
1980 Romanian Union of Fine Arts (UAP) Gallery in Cluj, Romania;
1980 The Art Museum in Galaţi, Romania;
1973 Drawings-Design, Pictorial Poems, Parcel Poems, Orizont Gallery, Bucharest, Romania;
1968 Painting, Students House, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
RECENT GROUP EXHBITIONS
2021 I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe, Delmes & Zander, Cologne, Germany, Mar – Apr 2021
2020 Accrochage - Alexandru Chira, Helga Goetze, Agatha Wojciechowsky, Delmes & Zander, Cologne, Germany
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Borcherdt, Gesine. Alexandru Chira. BLAU International, no. 4, 2021, p. 60-69.
Chira, Alexandru. Cuvinte pentru ochi: eseuri, dialoguri, articole etc (Words for Eyes: Essays, dialogues, articles, etcetera). Bistriţa : Charmides, 2007.
