Dan Perjovschi is a Romanian cartoonist, famous on the international art scene for his unique cartoons that are composed of various images and texts, applied directly on internal or external architectural surfaces. His drawings, half graffiti-half cartoon, cover the walls of museums and galleries worldwide.

By Alexandra Fodor

Dan Perjovschi was born in 1961 in Sibiu, Romania. He graduated the painting department of the George Enescu University of Arts in Iasi, Romania. Since 1991, Perjovschi has worked as an illustrator and art director at the Romanian publication Revista 22, the first political magazine launched in Romania, after the fall of communism.

He attracted international attention in 1999, at the 48th Venice Biennale, when he covered the floor of the Romanian Pavilion with cartoons and political graffiti about life in post-communist Romania.

Perjovschi’s work has appeared on the walls of museums and contemporary art places throughout Europe and America, including Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool, Centre Pompidou, Salzburger Kunstverein, Kunsthalle Basel, Moscow Biennale, San Francisco Art Institute, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and many more.

He uses cartoons and comic illustration to comment on and satirize social and political issues and he is famous for the unusual ways in which he exhibits his art. His drawings are covering a variety of topics such as European Union, the Olympics, Avatar, Haiti, the Greek economy or the late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

His solo exhibitions include “Naked Drawings” at Ludwig Museum, Koln (2005), “The Room Drawing” at Tate Modern London, “On the Other Hand” at Portikus Frankfurt, “May First”, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006), “What happened to US? Project 85” at the Museum of Modern Art and “I am not Exotic I am Exhausted” at Kunsthalle Basel (2007). Among his numerous groups exhibitions are “New Europe” at Generali Foundation Wien (2005), “Magelanic Cloud” at Centre Pompidou, Paris, “This is My Place,” Hamburg Kunstverein and “Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense”, Venice Biennale (2007).

In 2002 he won the Henkel CEE Prize for Contemporary Drawing and in 2004, he was awarded the George Macinuas Prize. In 2003, he was named visiting professor at the Ecole Superieure de Beaux Arts, Marseille and one year later the Collective Gallery invited him to be the unofficial artist-in-residence to the Edinburgh Festival.

In 2009, his drawings were exhibited at the Bloomberg SPACE gallery in London. In 2010, he had his first solo exhibition in Canada, at the Royal Ontario Museum where he drawn a series of provocative cartoons entitled “Dan Perjovschi – Late News”.

Recently, he was given an entire room at the Spencer Museum of Art to create “Dan Perjovschi Central Court”. The finished product is a series of drawings covering topics like international politics or the Iraq War. Perjovschi exhibition will be on display on until February 6, 2011.

Dan Perjovschi currently lives and works in Bucharest. Read more about him on his website.

alex@romania-insider.com