EBIENALE — George Enescu Festival, Bucharest
Presented as part of the visual arts program of the George Enescu Festival, this solo exhibition explored the relationship between musical rhythm and the drawn gesture. Through intricate line structures and choreographic figures, Beba’s drawings echoed the Festival’s spirit—translating sound into motion and emotion into form.
For the 2013 edition of the George Enescu Festival, the EBienale invited a select number of contemporary artists to respond visually to themes of rhythm, harmony, and the poetic resonance of sound. Within this prestigious context, Beba held a solo exhibition at Librăria Bizantină—an intimate cultural space whose architectural simplicity amplified the elegance and clarity of her drawn language.
The exhibition centered on her Balerine works and the early black-and-white line structures that shaped her artistic vocabulary. Here, movement emerges from repetition. Delicate strokes curve, accumulate, diverge, and reunite, creating forms that oscillate between abstraction and the memory of bodies in motion. The figures—sometimes singular, sometimes multiplying into rhythmic clusters—appear to “dance” across the paper, embodying a visual counterpoint to Enescu’s musical architecture.
A defining feature of this exhibition was the juxtaposition of monochrome structural pieces with dancer permutations, which transformed the gallery into a space of visual music. The viewer could trace the rhythm of each drawing through its internal pulse, the tension between density and lightness, and the silence deliberately left around the lines.
The installation incorporated:
Large framed monochrome compositions
Serial works arranged in clean linear sequences
Small-format ink drawings set as miniature études, echoing musical notation
Gold-on-black works presented in a dark alcove, like illuminated manuscripts
Across the exhibition, the architecture of Librăria Bizantină—its wooden seating, narrow viewpoints, and dialogue with photography on the walls—created a layered, almost theatrical frame for the drawings. The result was a meditative environment where visual gesture and musical presence resonated with one another.
The 2013 Enescu EBienale thus marks an important chapter in Beba’s trajectory: her entry into a major international music-and-arts platform, and the recognition of her practice as one capable of translating rhythm, structure, and emotion into a unified contemporary voice.
Mementos
