Having visited Casa Ceaușescu in the north of Bucharest, we decided to visit the nearby Museum of Recent Art, a five-minute walk down Bulevardul Primăverii. It was easy to spot with a sculpture of what appeared to be two intertwined golden scissors outside.
We firstly fortified ourselves at the ground-floor coffee shop, Beans and Dots, where I had an excellent flat white and my husband tried a craft beer, Zagânu.
We paid 50 Lei or £8.55 for both of us (a reduced rate for pensioners) or £8.55 and in return got a wristband of the type worn at all-inclusive hotels – this was presumably to distinguish visitors who were just using the café. A leaflet provided the floor plan and invited us to scan a QR code to download a free copy of the catalogue. Having done so, we found a 160-page document with extremely small print describing each exhibit in far more detail than we needed.
The exhibits were located over three floors, and before we took the lift to the top, we were offered a complimentary 15-minute tour, which we declined.
Basically, there was some very weird art, particularly in the ‘Shades of Black’ gallery where one painting was literally a black canvas. In ‘Hard Edge Painting with a Twist’, many canvases simply had straight lines. We felt that the accompanying signs, in both Romanian and English, were a little incomprehensible and ‘arty-farty’.
We found the smaller display of sculptures more interesting, particularly what appeared to be three pairs of self-standing trousers and a doll’s house covered in a spider web of cotton, although the latter begged the question ‘why?’ A room attendant told us to be careful not to kick a spiral coil of bricks laid out on the floor, which were not stuck down in any way. Having asked if there had been any problems, she said that because the pictures were so big, people tended to stand back without looking behind them, resulting in some rather unfortunate accidents.
The leaflet listed all the artists, and the only familiar name was Antony Gormley. Having been unable to find an exhibit bearing his name, I was told it was being restored.
Before leaving we browsed the inevitable gift shop which had a range of items as quirky as the exhibits we’d seen.
