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

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.