Serban Ionescu, The Great Outdoors
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Minjae Kim, Phantom–22 Serban Ionescu, The Great Outdoors Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Oríkì (Act III) George Sherman, Embers Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon, Quaternion
Lindsey Muscato & Joshua Friedman, Treehugger Henry Kim, Terra Firma Bernhard Hausegger, Doppelgänger Various Artists, Objects for a Heavenly Cave Klas Ernflo and Marc Morro, Árboles Isabel Rower, Box Works Various Artists, Design Miami L.A. Myoung-Ae Lee and Isabel Rower at NADA Various Artists, Rites of Spring Bennet Schlesinger, In Tune With Itself Michael Bennett, We Gotta Get Back to the Crib George Sherman, On Fire
Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Oríkì (Act II) Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon, No Life Ben Sanders, New Caps The North American Pavilion Various Artists, Make–Do Sarah Burns, Prairie’s Edge Jonah Takagi, Brut Vessels L.A. Door, Open & Close Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Oríkì (Act I)
A History of Frogs, Elf House Various Artists, Reading Room Ross Hansen, Tino’s White Horses STOOLS from the JF Chen Collection Roula Partheniou, Two and Two Together Marta at Frieze Los Angeles George Sherman, FOX, BOBCAT, BEAR
Marta & Stanley’s Holiday Fête Various Artists, Under / Over East Built In at the Neutra VDL House Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon, HOG TRAP Minjae Kim, I Was Evening All Afternoon Chouinard Benches, 1921–1972 Peter Harkawik, Pool Toys Erik Benjamins et al., For Modern Resting
Various Artists, Under / Over Base 10, Kodama Elvire Bonduelle, New Waves
Klas Ernflo, Anorak Alex Reed, International Ceramics Friendship Park

Works

Serban Ionescu
The Great Outdoors
April 19 – May 31 2025
Opening April 19, 5 – 8PM

Various sculptures—Schist, Ripley, Freddie, Candy, and Quadri—from Ionescu’s The Great Outdoors.

Opening
Saturday, April 19
5 – 8PM

On View
April 19 – May 31 2025

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Homage to the Frame

Marta is pleased to host The Great Outdoors, an exhibition of new work by Romanian-born, Paris-based artist Serban Ionescu. Presented in three sites among the gallery’s Anteroom, the complex’s landscaped courtyard, and the building’s corrugated façade, this presentation of painting and sculpture—many works a cross-pollination of the two—pays homage to the Frame (as it relates to film, painting, and myriad other mediums) and the visions and illusions that it contains, structures, and supports.

Titled after Howard Deutch’s 1988 comedy film of the same name, Ionescu’s exhibition identifies cinema as a primary means to examine systems of framing and the ways in which the genre articulates its most fundamental device. Within the cinematic frame, a narrative is composed and then introduced to its audience within a fixed perimeter—its chaos, no matter how vast, cannot exceed those bounds. Deutch’s film and Ionescu’s presentation both emphasize this paradox of vast enclosure through use of the idiom ‘the great outdoors,’ which makes reference to the relationship between setting and form, and their mutual exclusions. It is this relationship that the artist continues to explore in this new body of work, building on a practice that seeks to merge two- and three-dimensional mediums in order to dissolve preconditioned boundaries and fabricate new ones.

Visitors first encounter Ionescu’s work upon entry into the gallery complex’s courtyard. Positioned in and amongst the seven tree-bed cut-outs, the artist’s vibrant planes join together with ease and curiosity, each painted and patinated steel element inquiring as to the nature of the other. Beneath the sycamores, Ionescu’s sculptures engage with the work of Terremoto—the California-based landscape architecture design studio that conceived the courtyard and its attendant flora—activating the cut-outs in compliment to the sages and mallows that spring up from the gravel beds. As visitors move toward the gallery’s entryway, they encounter a painting suspended from the roof so that it hangs against the building’s façade—yet another locus in which Ionescu has chosen to generate a site of exhibition. Architecture, as with cinema, possesses an intrinsic claim to the Frame—every design, no matter how basic, relies on systems of framing to achieve construction and silhouette. Within the gallery’s Anteroom, Ionescu calls attention to this principle and its relationship to traditional presentations of two-dimensional media; colorful shaped steel suggests traditional framing via rectangular forms that have been deliberately obfuscated by the oblique angles and generous amorphisms of Ionescu’s composites; elsewhere, several shaped paintings on wood panels depart the frame entirely, instead ‘framed’ by the wall of the gallery’s Anteroom.

As paintings and sculptures move and transform between medium, wall and floor, and interior and exterior space, visitors experience a constant and intuitive play on shifting scale and form, emphasized by the distinct lines that emerge from the artist’s intensive drawing practice. Color and cartoon-adjacent gesture, as well as abstract and anthropomorphic shapes interweave like the intricate mechanisms of an asynchronous watch, keeping time with a cacophonous rhythm that spills from its own confines towards the infinite.

Serban Ionescu
(b. 1984, Ploiesti)

Portrait of the artist by Sean Davidson.

Serban Ionescu (b. 1984) was born in Romania and moved to New York City at ten years old. He currently lives and works between Paris and New York. Ionescu’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, drawing, and architecture. Known for his vibrant use of color, Ionescu has consistently explored the relationship between line, plane, and volume, negotiating a constant and intuitive play on shifting forms and formats across mediums. Large-scale steel and aluminum sculpture-follies—Chapel for an Apple (2020), Tower for an Hour (2022), Smokey (2023)—are Ionescu’s return to a post-architectural studio practice. He recently finished his first public sculpture, the 33-ft. tall Room for a Shroom (2024), in Zonhoven, Belgium. Ionescu has presented solo exhibitions at R & Company (New York), Larrie (New York), and Everyday Gallery (Antwerp). His work has been published in The New York Times, Wallpaper*, Architectural Digest, Dwell, DAMN, and New York Magazine. His first book, A Thing on a Table in a House, which surveys the artist’s colorful steel works, was published by Apartmento in 2021; its spiritual sequel, 148 Oblique Drawings, followed in 2023. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Pratt Institute and, from 2010–16, was an adjunct professor of Architecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Great Outdoors is the artist’s first solo presentation with Marta, following his participation in the expansive group outing Under / Over, in 2021.

Marta

Marta is a Los Angeles-based, globally-engaged art gallery. Founded in 2019, the gallery makes space for artists to experiment with the utility of design, and for designers to explore the abandonment of function. Marta’s curatorial, publication, and podcast programs take interest in the process of a work’s creation as well the narrative of its creator(s). Marta embraces the intersection of and the transition between disciplines, advocates for diversity in design, and promotes broad access to the arts.