The Gate 1992

Geta Bratescu made this piece, The Gate, with collage, playing with shapes and colour. I love seeing the evidence of process, it feels so intimate, and here you really get a sense of Bratescu figuring things out as she goes. The surface has so much texture, you can almost feel the different paper weights and imagine her hands piecing it all together. That bright blue is so present, it both defines the shape of the gate and contrasts those muted pinks and beiges. There’s one collage square in the top left, where the pink is almost a deep, saturated red, like a little burst of energy that pulls the whole thing together. It gives this area so much depth within the collage. Bratescu was a contemporary of people like Louise Bourgeois, and like her, she kept working, kept experimenting, and kept finding new ways to see the world right up to the end of her life. For Bratescu, art was a journey, not a destination.