Bucharest events: Mihai Plătică show to open at Gaep
<p><em>Oh, Be a Fine Girl/Guy, Kiss Me!</em>, an exhibition inspired by the legacy of “Harvard Computers,” is set to open at Gaep on May 17.</p>

<p>The Harvard Computers were a team of women, math whizzes, devoted stargazers, and later physics and astronomy majors, hired beginning with the 1880s by the Harvard Observatory to study its growing photographic glass plate collection.</p>

<p>The show, the artist’s second solo one with the gallery, is titled after the mnemonic used as a way to remember the star classification system OBAFGKM (also known as the Harvard spectral classification).</p>

<p>The exhibition features almost 40 new photographs and objects. The works can be divided into five groups based on the artist’s chief concerns: spectroscopy, birefringence, full-spectrum photography, photoelasticity, and light-reflecting landscapes.</p>

<p>From photographic maps of the sky to a large object inspired by a fictional “slow glass” through which light takes a year to pass, the exhibition “encapsulates a methodical attempt at expanding our vision beyond the naked eye and our curiosity beyond the familiar.”</p>

<p>Mihai Plătică graduated with a degree in Photography from the Art and Design of Cluj-Napoca, the city where he lives and works. He took part in the exhibition Suddenly Clear with Diana Popuț at the Art Museum in Cluj, and in&nbsp;<em>Departures From the Sphere</em>, a group exhibition part of the European co-production Both Ways, part of EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF2020, Trieste). His first exhibition with Gaep was Alpher-Bethe-Gamow in 2021.</p>

<p><em>(Photo: Mihai Plătică, Photoelastic Stress Glass Plate Mountain 4, 2024, courtesy of the artist and Gaep)</em></p>

<p><em>simona@romania-insider.com</em></p>