Bride's Run 

Curator: Well, hello there! Let me introduce you to "Bride's Run", a watercolour piece by Margareta Sterian. Isn’t it intriguing? Editor: Intriguing is a good word. My first impression is one of elegant, perhaps slightly melancholic theatre. The colours are so muted, almost dreamlike. Is it finished, really? Curator: That ambiguity is part of Sterian's magic, I think. It's not precisely known when she created it, but what strikes me is the confident looseness, it allows the forms to breathe, doesn’t it? Editor: It does, and this unfinished quality also resonates with a period that saw massive social changes, particularly concerning women and their roles in Romanian society and artistic communities. This fluidity allowed artists to question old assumptions. Curator: Exactly. One can see those shifts right there in the characters depicted in the piece. While this appears as figuration it defies expectations of the established conventions within. Instead it expresses emotion above accuracy, the ladies move, and we catch their essences instead of photographic poses. Editor: That’s an interesting idea. Their presentation does seem to lean more toward internal representations as if catching these women as they prepare, perform or recover during a stage play. You've got the distinct impression of figures caught mid-movement, like captured feelings taking form. Curator: Precisely! And, look at the hints of Romanticism. The composition doesn’t offer realism so much as impressions. Sterian lets you feel the subjects' state as if these characters are fleeting. The focus isn't just the outward appearance but their felt presence. It has a touch of Impressionism in how light plays, no? Editor: Definitely! And her works at the time engaged more directly in what became a national fixation on constructing national identity on and off stage, so it reflects its cultural and social life and values in such uncertain times for expression in art. It almost gives it more layers now as an art historical point, in terms of how museums and public galleries frame work now in a cultural history sense. Curator: A performance of memory! It holds space, I think, for the many stories implied by its lack of solid form, while holding a mirror to history’s uncertain memory of identities once present and in flux. Editor: Indeed, and in a way this watercolour illustration performs history and imagination so delicately for our contemporary senses, still! Curator: Sterian’s quiet power continues to ripple forward, and backwards, across time. Editor: Very true! The work’s haunting delicacy resonates long after one's moved on.