States of Mind

The Perjovschis create work that resides at the nexus of art, society, and politics

Accompanies the mid-career retrospective of the work of Romanian artists Dan Perjovschi and Lia Perjovschi at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. This illustrated book contains more than 350 color and black and white images of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, and conceptual art.States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi accompanies the mid-career retrospective of the work of Romanian artists Dan Perjovschi and Lia Perjovschi at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Both born in 1961 and educated in Romania, Dan and Lia Perjovschi create work that resides at the nexus of art, society, and politics; both artists belong to the first avant-garde movement following the 1989 Romanian Revolution. Dan Perjovschi is internationally renowned for large-scale drawing installations commenting on current events, cultural paradoxes, and art world institutions and practices. Lia Perjovschi was recognized as one of the most significant performance artists in Romania between 1987 and 2003 when she stopped performing, and is now known as a conceptual artist analyzing cultural and historical formations.

This richly illustrated book contains more than 300 images (including 180 in color) of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, and conceptual art from 1986 to the present, as well work from a recent installation of Dan Perjovschi’s at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It also contains an original text by the artists, “AutoChronology,” which is a timeline of their life to the present, and the most comprehensive bibliography on the artists to date. Three essays discuss the artists: a substantial survey text by art historian and curator Kristine Stiles, the leading scholar on the Perjovschi’s art; another by Romanian-American author and National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu; and a third by the Romanian scholar, curator, and recipient of the 1996 Carl Einstein Prize for Art Criticism in Germany, Marius Babias. The catalog includes interviews with each artist by the Romanian-American art historian and curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, and by Kristine Stiles.

Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University