TOKYO.- MAKI Gallery is presenting Shadow of Others, a solo exhibition by Romanian artist Marius Bercea at the Omotesando Gallery. Returning to Japan following his acclaimed 2021 show, Bercea unveils his latest works exploring notions of history, memory, and identity.

For two decades, Bercea has developed a diverse body of work investigating the social and psychological impacts of the Romanian Revolution, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the rise of consumer capitalism in Romania. His paintings often merge contrasting perspectives, creating a space where fiction and reality, glamour and fragility, memory and oblivion intersect, posing questions that function both as a historical reflection and an autobiographical journey.

In his first solo exhibition in Japan at MAKI Gallery in 2021, Bercea depicted a generation of young artists born and raised following a transformative period in Romanian history, highlighting their nostalgia, insecurity, and the weight of uncertainty. The sense of confinement expressed in those works resonated acutely with the global pandemic, during which many experienced a disrupted relationship with time. With his keen interests in time, memory, and identity, Bercea continues to explore how this generation evolves socially, politically, and culturally.

Building upon that, his latest body of work expands his visual language while maintaining the exploration of historical and personal perspectives. This exhibition presents his most recent works, anchored by the centerpiece Shadow of Others—a painting that lends its name to the exhibition. In this work, Bercea contemplates Romania’s historical position on the periphery, navigating its shifting relationships with dominant global powers. Figures in the painting appear to enjoy a seaside setting, yet plants and sunshades partially obscure them, their forms blending into the landscape.

A similar sense of ambiguity and transition permeates Hottest Day of Summer, one of the rare horizontal compositions in Bercea’s oeuvre. Unfolding like a serene social frieze, the painting captures a moment of quiet leisure—figures reclining beneath a billowing white camouflage net, basking in the breeze. Yet beneath this stillness, the unseen forces of change stir. The work visually paraphrases Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, where the wind carries the weight of shifting eras. Echoing the song’s poignant refrain—“As the present now / Will later be past”—Bercea’s composition evokes the tension between nostalgia and an uncertain future. Within this tranquil landscape, the passage of time lingers in the air, suggesting both an ending and a beginning.

Homesick Blue distills familiarity and longing into a restrained composition—two figures, an Art Deco fence, and a hazy blue pool. Bercea reflects on American cinema as a utopian dreamscape, shaping visions of home through Hollywood’s golden age. Referencing 1920s Los Angeles—a metropolis built on shared aspirations—the work evokes Calvino’s “invisible cities.” The shimmering pool and intricate fence are more than details; they are visual relics embedded in cultural memory. Like a film still, suspended in time, the painting captures the subtle interplay between longing and belonging, reality and illusion.

Alongside his exploration of vast historical and cultural references, Bercea’s recent works have also turned inwardly, reflecting on his personal experiences of fatherhood. In Dreaming in a Dream, he portrays his young son oscillating between sleep and wakefulness, blurring the boundaries between dream, allegory, and reality. The child, wrapped in a pink blanket adorned with lizard prints (a subtle nod to Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard), sits on a Bertoia sun chair, surrounded by numbered 1960s post office cabinets and a Venetian marble floor. These disparate elements situate the child’s presence across multiple temporal and spatial dimensions, reinforcing Bercea’s fascination with layered memory.

The juxtaposition of memory and time is central to Bercea’s practice. His paintings weave together recollections of 1980s Romania, the country’s modernisation and capitalist transition, the aftermath of the Cold War, and the landscapes of both his native Transylvania and California, to which he has strong connections. Rather than seeking to reconstruct memories with precision—an act he believes could diminish their essence—Bercea aims to establish an atmosphere of collective mythology and suspended time.

For Bercea, painting is an ongoing daily practice, fueled by a continuous encounter with art history, literature, cinema, music, and travel. Through constant exploration in his painting laboratory, his work embodies the boundless possibilities of painting, navigating between socio-political concerns and personal experiences. We warmly invite you to witness Shadow of Others—a compelling meditation on history, memory, and identity—through Bercea’s evocative and multilayered visual language.

Written by Haruna Takeda

Born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 1979, Marius Bercea received both his BA and MA at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Bercea’s vividly colored paintings harbor melancholic undertones in their depictions of the banalities and uncertainties of life in post-Communist Romania. Alongside Adrian Ghenie and Victor Man, Bercea is regarded as one of the leading artists of the Cluj School, a group of painters who coalesced in Cluj-Napoca after the 1989 Romanian Revolution. His subjects are often set against decorative yet decrepit backdrops, embodying the intimate, inherently autobiographical nature of his work. Reality and fiction, growth and decay, personal memory and public history collide in the artist’s fragmented scenes, in which lush landscapes, imposing architecture, and elusive figures coexist in a precarious balance.

Bercea’s recent solo exhibitions include This Side of Paradise, Art Encounters Foundation (Timișoara, Romania, 2024); Echo of a Breaking String, Lyles & King (New York, 2024); Blue Silk, François Ghebaly (New York, 2022); and The Far Sound of Cities, MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2021). His works are also part of numerous public and private collections, such as the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Zabludowicz Collection, London; and Olbricht Collection, Berlin.