TEN YEARS AFTER - 1999

TEN YEARS AFTER – NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART OF ROMANIA – BUCHAREST – 1999

In December 1999, a decade after the events of 1989, the National Museum of Art of Romania hosted the exhibition “TEN YEARS AFTER” by Valeriu Mladin.

The project included a monumental oil painting on canvas (10 × 3 m), depicting young men killed during the Revolution, shown as heroes with death certificates pinned to their chests, alongside eight “gramineous” sculptures – life-size human bodies made of germinated wheat (an original technique). These works evoked both the idea of relics and the martyr-like death of over 1,000 young people, while also alluding to the shocking images broadcast by national television of the bodies discovered in Timișoara. Although in reality those corpses were not directly connected to the Revolution, they were used to provoke emotion and drive people into the streets.

After the exhibition closed, the wheat bodies were laid on a cultivated field, where they decomposed and were eventually absorbed and covered by the surrounding crop.

The painting is part of the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) and was later shown in the exhibition “FUNERARIA” (curated by Mihai Oroveanu), hosted by the same museum in 2011.