Dumitru Gorzo

Like Willem de Kooning, Gorzo treats the figure as a site of force; like Philip Guston, he reaches for the grotesque as a vehicle for psychological charge.”

— Charles Moore, The Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2026
 

SLAG&RX is pleased to announce No.14, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Dumitru Gorzo, marking the artist’s fourteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation continues a relationship that began in 2008, when Gorzo’s In the Corner of My Eye inaugurated SLAG Gallery in New York. Nearly two decades later, his practice remains as restless, irreverent, and resistant to categorization as ever.

In No.14, Gorzo returns to the human figure as a site of continual transformation. Bodies are stretched, compressed, fragmented, and reassembled into unexpected configurations. Faces emerge from other faces; hands become emblems; musical instruments and anatomical forms merge into hybrid beings that seem equally indebted to folklore, ritual, caricature, and modernist abstraction. These figures inhabit an unstable territory between the familiar and the fantastic, where humor and unease coexist.

Working with a direct, gestural language, Gorzo constructs his images through vigorous passages of color, exposed drawing, and abrupt shifts in scale and proportion. Charcoal lines remain visible, sometimes contradicting the painted forms they delineate. Eyes, mouths, and limbs multiply or migrate across the surface, unsettling any fixed understanding of the body. The paintings retain the immediacy of drawing while asserting a distinctly physical presence. Their apparent spontaneity conceals a sustained investigation into how images are formed, disrupted, and transformed.

The works presented in No.14 extend questions that have occupied Gorzo throughout his career: the relationship between figuration and abstraction, the persistence of archaic and vernacular imagery, and the capacity of the grotesque to communicate what conventional representation cannot. Yet these paintings resist easy symbolism. Their subjects seem to participate in private ceremonies, performances, or encounters whose meaning remains deliberately open. They invite recognition while continually frustrating it.

The exhibition follows two significant presentations in Bucharest: INWARDS/OUTWARDS at MARe, the Museum of Recent Art (2025–2026), which extended the artist’s practice across the museum’s interior and exterior architecture, and Șantier at /SAC @ Malmaison (2026), an exhibition centered on experimentation, material transformation, and the unresolved nature of artistic production. Both exhibitions reveal an artistic process in which revision, experimentation, and the unresolved are integral to the work.

The title No.14 carries no thematic prescription. Instead, it acknowledges an artistic dialogue sustained over eighteen years, during which Gorzo’s work has evolved across painting, drawing, sculpture, and interventions in architectural and public space. What persists is his refusal of a fixed visual vocabulary and his conviction that an image must remain open to reinvention.
 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1975 in Ieud, Romania, Dumitru Gorzo lives and works between Bucharest and New York. He studied painting at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and was a founding member of Rostopasca, the influential Romanian artist collective. 

Gorzo has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States, with solo and group presentations at prominent institutions including the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), Colorado; New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art (NJ MoCA); Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu; Kunstverein Viernheim, Germany; Marina Abramović Institute, San Francisco; Kunsthalle Budapest; MODEM, Debrecen; and Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg. His work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale (Romanian Pavilion) and the Istanbul Biennial.

His recent institutional solo exhibitions include Șantier. Continuous Studio 10 at /SAC @ MALMAISON, Bucharest, and INWARDS/OUTWARDS at MARe, the Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest. Recent gallery exhibitions include Inhabitance and Double Take at SLAG&RX, New York; Pictodrome and Doi Gorzo at Arsmonitor Gallery, Bucharest; Astea Nu Sunt Desene at Borderline Art Space, Iași; and Forms at RX&SLAG, Paris. His ongoing Continuous Studio projects, including presentations in Bistrița and at /SAC @ MALMAISON in Bucharest, further reflect his commitment to experimentation and artistic processes that remain deliberately open-ended.

Gorzo's relationship with SLAG&RX dates to 2008, when his exhibition In the Corner of My Eye inaugurated the gallery's program in New York. No.14 marks his fourteenth solo exhibition with the gallery, reflecting nearly two decades of sustained artistic collaboration.