A Tyler Invited Research Fellowship has been awarded to Associate Professor Caterina Preda, for 2022.
She will develop her project, Corneliu Petrescu's Artworks in the Context of the Tyler Collection: a Cross-regional Trans-Ideological Friendship during the Cold War, and present a virtual public presentation at the conclusion of her project.
This award supports researchers, art historians, and artists to travel to Tasmania for a minimum of two weeks and engage with the Tyler Collection.
About the presentation
Corneliu Petrescu's Artworks in the Context of the Tyler Collection: a Cross-regional Trans-Ideological Friendship during the Cold War
In this virtual public presentation, Dr Preda will discuss the case of the Romanian artist Corneliu Petrescu (1924-2009) and his atypical experience as an artist who could travel freely to the West while living under a totalitarian regime in Romania. The key to this partial freedom was Petrescu’s friendship with an Australian-born collector, Geoffrey Tyler, who worked for the International Monetary Fund in Washington and oversaw the Romanian file. Visiting Bucharest in the mid-1970s, Tyler discovered Petrescu’s artworks and began a great friendship that lasted until the end of their lives.
Preda explores Petrescu’s artworks and unpacks how this kind of unexpected cross-regional and trans-ideological connection was possible, through using concepts such as the “Nylon Curtain” (Péteri 2004), and by clarifying several aspects related to the rich triangular Tasmanian-Romanian-United States relationship.
Image: Photograph of Caterina Preda with Corneliu Petrescu's "Portrait of Geoffrey"
About the Invited Research Fellow:
Caterina Preda, PhD, Habil. is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest where she teaches undergraduate courses on Latin American politics, Art and polit ics, and a graduate course on Cultural memory in South America and Eastern Europe. Her research is interdisciplinary and deals with art in dictatorships, artistic memory in post-dictatorships in South America and Eastern Europe (Chile and Romania), cultural memory, post-communism, Latin American studies, and the visual representation of the Roma. She is the author of Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorship (Palgrave, 2017). Her most recent research projects dealt with the case of the Romanian Artists' Union (UAP), and the art and politics of memory of the dictatorship in South America and Eastern Europe" (2018-2020).