Marius Bercea, Untitled (Thoughts Safari), 2024

The last two-plus decades have seen Marius Bercea’s (b. 1979, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) work visually and psychologically explore the places and people the artist encounters, reflecting on the discontinuities, parallels, and transformations that follow consumerism, capitalism, and migration. Bercea often fuses dichotomous views and creates the premises of a meeting point between fiction and reality, glamour and fragility, memory and oblivion, formulating questions that forge both a historical survey and an autobiographical incursion. As a result of these dense and recurrent interrogations, the whole painterly laboratory of the artist becomes an infinite territory of exploration, as the artist calls it, where the archive meets the accidental. The weaving of two geographical areas, Transylvania and California, generated the “Transylfornian” landscape, both a geographical trope and an identifying feature. The artist’s ongoing journeys to the west coast are always cluttered by collected stories, literary motifs, visual patterns, and fresh intuitions, which fuel his utopian scenery and his travels between two worlds. 

The visual experience is driven mainly by the permanent dialogue between the large-scale paintings and the small cut-out moments of rapid observations that punctuate the display like a needle and thread, sewing together Bercea’s micro and the macro universes. The personal creative process is being revealed by means of two types of archives on display: there is the analogue, pre-internet studio work, featuring drawings, psychedelic watercolours, stencils, and dioramas; and there is the digital archive, corresponding to the internet age, influenced by the devices we use as extensions of our hands, including a series of on-the-road photos in the desert. The desert remains a terminus point, a proof of nature’s resilience and a geometrical abstraction, a reminder of the “nostalgia of belonging”, a significant structural element in Marius Bercea’s work. 

Born in 1979 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Marius Bercea received both his B.A. in 2003 and M.A. in 2005 at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Bercea’s recent solo exhibitions include: Echo of a Breaking String, Lyles and King (New York, 2024); Blue Silk, Francois Ghebaly (New York, 2022); The Far Sound of Cities, MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2021); Thieves of Time, François Ghebaly (Los Angeles, 2020); Time Can Space, Blain|Southern (Berlin, 2018); A Full Rotation of the Moon, Cluj Museum of Art (Cluj-Napoca, 2017). His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as: Episode 1:Bump, Matt Carey Williams, Cork Street 9 (London, 2024); Looking Anew and Beyond, Taubman Museum (Roanoke, 2023); Transgression throughout the Volatile World, Asia Art Center (Taipei, 2021); La Brique, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse (2019); Appearance and Essence, Art Encounters Biennial Timișoara (2015); Defaced, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (2014); Hotspot Cluj, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art (Skovvej, 2014); European Travellers, Mucsarnok Budapest (2012); No New Thing Under the Sun, Royal Academy (London, 2010); the 4th Prague Biennale (2009). 

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Pomona College is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading liberal arts colleges, offering an ideal environment for intellectually curious students to pursue their academic and life goals. 

Pomona holds a unique role in creating opportunity in American higher education and is committed to enrolling the best students regardless of financial circumstances. To that end, Pomona College is one of a small group of colleges committed to meeting the full demonstrated financial need of all students who enroll.

Established in 1887, the College is located in Claremont, California, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles.

This memorial scholarship honors Benjamin Lloyd Cloer '15, who devoted his life to improve the condition of humanity by seeking an education in areas he believed would make it possible to achieve that goal.

Lloyd was awarded an academic scholarship to attend Pomona College in Claremont, CA. In addition to his course studies, Lloyd worked as a research assistant studying biological neural networks and the binding of diabetes drugs using Dual Polarization Interferometry. He was a member of the Future-Tech Club, Bit Coin Club and the Nu Alpha Phi Frarority. In 2015, he earned a Bachelor of Science in neuroscience with a minor in mathematics from Pomona.

Attending this wonderful college opened the door to his future plans and gave him the excellent education and the breeding ground for all great ideas. In the fall of 2018, Lloyd entered the newly established Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (M.S.A.I.) program at the University of Georgia. He also worked as a professor assistant at UGA. While at UGA, Duke University selected Lloyd to develop and teach a four-week summer course, "An Introduction to AI," which was held for high school students on the Georgia Tech campus and which was designed entirely by him.

Without a similar scholarship, he would have never been able to afford going to Pomona and we hope this endowment will enable many students like him to receive the highest possible education. 

Please support the scholarship by collecting one of Marius Bercea's beautiful screen prints available from August 6 6pm CET.

Or alternatively donate directly to the fund (we will match donations up to 2000 USD):