art encounters timisoara arad

The Academy Library Episcop Augustin Pacha Street 7

You enter through a richly sculpted gate with wooden mechanisms that struggle to turn on their ancient and almost seized hinges… The building – huge, bearing the evident impress of the German Renaissance after whose style it is built – greets you with a long corridor leading to an inner courtyard. On one side, a wooden wall with windows along its entire length gives onto the main body of the building. The entrance hall is at least six metres in height and is generously lit by cast iron candelabra with spreading arms. Everyrhing exudes the confidence of a period of wealth and grandeur – the late nineteenth century. This building, erected in 1891 and donated to the city by Ormós Zsigmond, Count of Timiş, together with his entire art collection, was home to the initial nucleus of the future Art Museum. After nationalisation, the building was allocated to the Romanian Academy, which in 1953 turned it into a library.

On either side of the corridor, stacks the height of a man, holding books arranged by category. The smell of paper enters your every pore and an atmosphere of olden days keeps you company. In the courtyard in front of the entrance, an atmosphere of faded elegance pervades the dry pond, whose metal works show bare and out of place among the weeds that have invaded them. Wild decay flowing among the stones.

The place immerses you in history. Everything around you engenders poetry: the spiders, the creaking of the wooden stairs, the roof with its exposed beams… A disturbing experience: books and time, entities that you feel with your physical senses, ready to allow themselves to be converted into art.

Exhibitions

Lament Installation by Anca Munteanu Rimnic Library of the Romanian Academy 2-6 October, 11:00-19:00

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