Paul Neagu: Generative Codes

Artwill… presents Paul Neagu. Generative Codes, curated by Magda Radu, on view from April 18–May 31, 2026. The opening will take place on Saturday, April 18, 4–8pm, at Artwill…, 54 Duetului Street, Bucharest, Romania.

The exhibition offers a synthetic overview of Paul Neagu's artistic trajectory, from his early experiments with tactile art initiated in Romania and continued in the United Kingdom to the construction of complex artistic systems articulated through drawing, objects, performative actions, and sculpture. An experimental artist, Neagu constructed expansive constellations of works, infused by the aspiration to attain unity through "open axiomatic" artistic formulas, regarding art as a vector of communication and convergence.

The exhibition proposes an immersion into Neagu’s theoretical and formal universe, presenting all the media he worked in, and the stages of his trajectory, with a particular focus on a dimension central to his practice: the expressive formulas that evoke those akin to ritual, understood both as a communicational relay—a means of sharing collective experiences—and as a way of reaching inter- and trans-subjective states, endowed with cosmological and metaphysical overtones. Throughout his practice, Neagu remained deeply engaged with the material concreteness of artistic expression, which he consistently connected to philosophical and spiritual inquiry.

From the outset, Neagu devised objects intended to interact with their environment, placing them in public spaces or activating them through performative demonstrations. These early works evolved into the formulation of the Palpable Art Manifesto, advocating for the reactivation of all senses in the perception of art and the surrounding world, and advancing the idea of the artwork as a concrete, tactile, and necessary presence.

His concern with overcoming the subject–object dichotomy is further developed in performative works such as Cake Man, where the relationship between part and whole is explored through symbolic processes of decomposition and re-composition of the human body. This line of inquiry continues in the cellular drawings and culminates in the invention of the Generative Art Group, a fictive collective of artists, each with his own personality and mode of operation, engaged in various performative scenarios—individual or collective—exploring strategies of estrangement, anamorphic distortions, and metamorphoses.

The sustained investigation into fragmentation and unification is followed by an interest in the vocabulary of sculpture, inaugurated through Neagu’s major invention: the Hyphen, signifying union and separation. Serving as a generative principle for his later work, the Hyphen underpins a broader sculptural vocabulary, including the Nine Catalytic Stations, where dynamic relations between form, material, and space produce structures that behave like living organisms, generating rhythm, energy, and interaction.

Through this exhibition, Artwill… continues to develop a platform dedicated to the presentation and contextualization of Romanian art, proposing meaningful encounters between historically significant practices and contemporary audiences.

Visiting hours: Saturday–Sunday, 10:00–18:00
Location: Artwill..., 54 Duetului Street, Bucharest