Gili Mocanu, and his 2012 residency and exhibition *Pride*

Gili Mocanu January 13th - March 8th, 2012

The Performance Art Institute is pleased to welcome back celebrated Romanian artist, Gili Mocanu, for his 2012 residency and exhibition *Pride*. His most current body of work marks a drastic shift in style for the
artist, which was inspired by his first stay in the United States, during his six-month residency at PAI in 2011.

Having studied at the National Academy of Art in Bucharest, Mocanu's training was one of the last of its kind to systematically employ the strict rules and techniques of traditional oil painting. The result of such rigorous historical and academic based training presents itself in the painfully meticulous precision of Mocanu's paintings. However, underneath the order and discipline of Mocanu's strict and methodical technique is an undercurrent of disorder and freedom that exists almost subversively so in relationship to the foregrounded order. Through the creation of visual tensions and coded messages, Mocanu reminds us of the thin and often indeterminable line between order and disorder, sense and non-sense.

Mocanu has exhibited across Europe and has had multiple solo-exhibitions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest. Pride is his first solo-exhibition in the United States.

The Performance Art Institute (PAI) is multifaceted art space dedicated to performance art and issues that matter in our society and culture. At the core of PAI is the artist-in-residence program, which is one of the first and only of its kind. In housing and showcasing new genre artists connected to performance, film, video, sound and avantgarde music, the artist-in-residence program focuses on the development and presentation of new work created in the freethinking and accessible atmosphere of PAI and San Francisco. Through creative alliances with local museums and nine bay area schools, artists from around the world are presented with the opportunity to meld their residency into the maximum creative environment to ideate, compose, perform and document fresh work.

The Performance Art Institute is located at 575 Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco http://theperformanceartinstitute.org
415-501-0575

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