We drove whole day to Vienna to see Tudor Ciurescu’s show, ELEGIA, at VUNU gallery Vienna. The weather didn’t help, cold and persistently wet, the kind of day that makes you question an opening before it even begins. That thought didn’t last long.
By the time we arrived, the space was already alive. You could feel it from across the street, a steady flow of people, a sense of anticipation that didn’t feel staged. Inside, the room held. Conversations carried, people stayed, and the mix was right, artists, curators, gallerists, editors. Ciurescu moved through it naturally, connecting people in the same way his work does, without making it obvious.
The logic of the exhibition followed. Nothing felt accidental. Ciurescu’s position between Switzerland and Milan, with a clear grounding in the Balkans, reads directly through the work. He builds from that in a way that ties place to instinct, each exhibition responding to its setting without losing its internal structure. ELEGIA is reduced to four works, a deliberate decision that sets the tone early. The show holds back, and that restraint becomes its defining quality.
ART
The first encounter comes quickly. Two rabbits in a sexual position, placed at the entrance, immediate and unmistakable. The reference is clear, but the execution resists anything crude. It sits somewhere controlled, almost formal, stripping the act of spectacle and redirecting it toward something quieter, closer to origin than provocation. Nearby, Freud appears fixed to a dartboard, pierced with darts. The gesture reads in two directions at once. It carries a sense of arrival, a direct statement of presence within Vienna, but also signals a break, a shift toward maturity, a departure from boyhood as Ciurescu approaches thirty.
The remaining works extend that line. Absence and death appear without emphasis, shifting the show toward something more cyclical. What starts with origin and birth gradually opens into a sense of growth and eventual end. The exhibition doesn’t push this reading, but it holds together with a quiet clarity. What remains consistent is the precision of execution, Ciurescu’s control over material and form stays exact throughout.
For DSCENE, Ciurescu sits down with his gallerist, nico bernath, to discuss ELEGIA, its reduced format, and the ideas shaping his work.
(nico bernath) What’s up, what’s good?
(Tudor Ciurescu) Mr. Gallerist! I’m back in the studio in Lausanne after two weeks of traveling, happy to be back. How about you?
(nico bernath)I’m good, I’m in Vienna at the moment. We operate three spaces now, so it’s a lot of back and forth, but right now I’m just enjoying my time here. Your show is on view, people are happy, we have great reactions, it’s a chill weekend.
I’ve always been an idea-driven artist. The work starts there, and everything else follows.
(TC) How do you manage three spaces?
(nico bernath) It takes a lot of passion and will. I have two assistants, one in Košice, one in Vienna, and they help keep things moving. But it’s really about the artists and the shows, that’s the whole point.
(TC) Let’s take it back to when we first met. Four years ago through Instagram. September 2022, right after I finished my Master’s. You messaged me after seeing my MFA thesis.
(nico bernath) The first thing that got me wasn’t even your art, it was your ideas.I was really interested in what you were asking, the whole topic of Systems of Value in an Alienated Context. I had similar thoughts about contemporary art. Then of course I deep-dived into your work.
(TC) A lot of people ask me how I started working with you, and I tell them it wasn’t through what you’d normally expect. Nobody was posting their written MFA thesis. Everyone just did it to finish school, but I treated it like any other work in my practice, like a painting or sculpture. So when people hear how it happened, they’re like, what? And the fact that it happened over Instagram, you in Slovakia, me in Switzerland, that’s very much how things work now. Very international, very internet.
Reducing the exhibition to four works shows a level of maturity, knowing exactly what you want to say.
(nico bernath) Yeah, very internet, but that’s not the whole story. I travel a lot, I put all my time and energy into it, for art, shows, fairs. That’s how we met in Milan in 2022. Then fast forward, we did our first show together in Košice. That was the only space back then. No VUNU Vienna, just VUNU Košice.
(TC) ICARUS was my first big international show. It opened in September 2023, and I think for both of us it opened a path. The show did very well online, creating buzz locally. The works traveled afterwards too, Kunsthalle Barmen, Germany last year for example.
(nico bernath) ICARUS was a great fit for VUNU Košice. The space is a former public pool, with concrete floors and walls. Your works, mostly monochromatic, really resonated with it.
(TC) Yeah, since my first solo in 2019 I’ve always done monochromatic shows, one color per show. In 2019 it was green. That show was actually supported by Monster Energy. Red followed. Then ICARUS. And now Vienna with brown wood.
(nico bernath) VUNU Vienna is a very different space. Boutique, street-facing window, wooden floor, cozy. A different country, different city. And I knew it was important to you that you respond to that context.
(TC) Vienna was very much in my mind, its history, its energy. That’s embedded in the show. When you first told me about Vienna, early 2025, I was like, damn, that’s next level.
I create my own alphabet through my work. That’s how I make sense of everything.
(nico bernath) It wasn’t really intentional. I opened VUNU Bratislava as the first real commercial branch. Before that, VUNU had been a project space for eight years. Vienna was always so close, 59 minutes by train from Bratislava. I knew we had to reach it in terms of audience and collectors. Then suddenly there was an opportunity to take over a space from friends. I said yes immediately. Since 2025 we’ve done four shows. The first three had a curatorial format, always a trio of artists. But from 2026 I wanted to focus more on solos. Your show is actually the first solo in the space.
(TC) You approached me around summer 2025. And instantly, when you said Vienna, I thought of this old bourgeoisie, royal, ex-capital-of-an-empire feeling. A gate between Eastern and Western Europe.
(nico bernath) You can really feel it, especially when you’re here for a few days. It’s everywhere, it’s the DNA of the city. But it also has a strong contemporary art scene that’s really growing, very dynamic.
(TC) Like Berlin but more royal, sort of.
(nico bernath) More classic, more conservative, but definitely more chill. How did the city influence the way you approached the show?
(TC)My foundation is clearly being a skater kid, that’s how art found me. I got expelled from normal school, sent to art school at 14, and my mind was split between this punk skate attitude, watching Jackass, and studying Albrecht Dürer. Back then I hated it because an authority told me to. Fast forward, I’m turning 30, and the past ten years have been about experimenting and finding my language.
It’s funny, I never properly learned the alphabet as a kid. My classmates learned it through this English song, to which I refused to pay attention. But it helped me in a way. Metaphorically, through my art, I create my own alphabet. And with this show I feel my language is more defined, the ideas are more readable.
The show reflects that mixture, the punk attitude placed into a Viennese context. I always work with contradictions. It’s funny because you found me through my ideas four years ago, and honestly I’m still an idea-driven artist. These days, many people are shaped by ideas rather than shaping ideas themselves. What I do is conceptual at its core. Since I was a kid I loved the feeling of having a great idea, and that remains central to everything.
This show taught me a lot. Compared to ICARUS, where we had 20 works, here we reduced it to four. That shows a level of maturity, knowing exactly what you want to say.
(nico bernath) The show is contextualized by a text by Aleksei Borisionok, a Viennese curator and writer, and a friend. I met him when he was working for Vienna Contemporary, which we attended twice with VUNU. Last year he invited us to the Zone 1 section, beautifully curated.
(TC) You won an award there, right?
(NB) Yes. We won the best solo booth with Natalia Sykorova. In terms of your show, we knew we wanted someone connected to Vienna and its scene. Alexei took it on and I think the text is very interesting, it pushes your ideas into a new perspective.
Vienna shaped the show. Its history and energy are embedded in how the works exist in the space.
(TC) He did a great job. I told him he’s the glue of the exhibition.
(nico bernath) He had full independence. He didn’t curate the show, he wrote the text, so he could think and write freely. The text and the show are separate, but they complement each other. It places your work into a more political context.
(TC) I never think of my work as political, but that’s exactly why it’s valuable when others do. It’s always interesting to see how people read works differently from how they were made. So tell me, what’s next for VUNU?
(nico bernath) ELEGIA is open until May 9th in Vienna. VUNU turned 10 this March. After ten years, I felt it was time for a reset. I decided to separate VUNU into two directions: the commercial side and the exhibition-making, creative side. I’m opening a new gallery under my name, Niko Bernarth, in Bratislava. VUNU remains in Košice and Vienna.
(TC)That sounds exciting. And how does VUNU navigate a time when so many galleries are closing?
(nico bernath)It feels like VUNU is being reborn. There’s the difficult international art market, and the Slovak political situation, with cultural funding disappearing. Hard times. But as Churchill said, never waste a good crisis. Maybe I’m just lucky to meet the right people. Maybe I’m just crazy. I don’t overthink it.
(TC) Hard times create great gallerists.
(nico bernath) Haha, exactly. Niko Bernarth opens April 28th, with a private opening in Bratislava. In June, together with Patrick Steinhauser from Steinhauser Gallery, we’re organizing a gallery weekend in Bratislava. Interesting things are happening. I love art, I love artists, I love making shows. Jazz was born without funding. Hip-hop was born without funding. I don’t let money take my dream away huh.
What are your plans?
(TC) I want to spend more time in the studio with the works before sending them out. The next project is a book, for anyone who hasn’t understood my practice yet, myself included. It will cover how everything started, the visual directions, where it all comes from. I’m turning 30, so I can now clearly look at the period from 14 to 20, and from 20 to 30. Hopefully that helps viewers understand my work better. I feel like I’ve only shown 10% of my vision so far, just assembling pieces of this puzzle called life.
I feel like I’ve only shown a small part of my vision so far, I’m still assembling the whole picture.
(nico bernath) You know, I’m turning 33.
(TC)…lights up cigarette
I know another guy who was 33.
(nico bernath) And I just want to say, everything I do is very spiritual. Not esoteric, but it comes from a different place than strategy. Gut feeling over planning.
(TC) Same here. Maybe that comes from our geographical sphere, this post-Eastern Bloc mentality. The tendency to move without a fixed strategy, to follow instinct. That could be spiritual, it could be cultural, but it feels rooted in this space.
(nico bernath) Absolutely.
Foreword by DSCENE Contributing Art Editor Vuk Cuk.
ELEGIA is on view at VUNU Vienna from March 27 to May 9.
