Construction Time Again, Vlad Nancă’s first solo show in Bucharest after his project in the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, is scheduled to open on April 24 at Gaep.
The exhibition imagines the relocation of modernism onto another planet through new works encompassing sculpture, installation, mosaics, works on paper, and video. “Looking to the past not with nostalgia, but through the lens of the future we seek to inhabit, Vlad Nancă gives modernist forms a second chance and reconsiders them as ethical propositions rooted in aspirations for better urban living,” according to a presentation of the exhibition.
This is Vlad Nancă’s first solo exhibition with Gaep, which announced in February that it would represent the artist.
With a sustained interest in architecture and the transformation of the built environment, Nancă revisits 20th-century modernism to imagine possible futures in response to contemporary conditions. His sculptures, installations, and wall-based mixed-media works frequently draw on archival material and references from art and architectural history, engaging with themes such as modernist architecture and modernity, the space race, (failed) utopias, and speculative narratives about future modes of living.
He first came to prominence for his use of political and cultural symbols to critically examine nostalgia and the social aftereffects of the Romanian Revolution, as well as the rise of capitalism in the early 2000s.
In 2025, he presented Human Scale in the Romanian Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, a collaborative project developed with Muromuro Studio. Human Scale reframed architectural drawing as a form of “collective intelligence”, emphasizing the centrality of the human figure within 20th-century architectural discourse.
(Illustration: Vlad Nancă, Future Landscape, photo by Cătălin Georgescu)
simona@romania-insider.com
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