A.S.C. Arts Sport Club

A.S.C. Arts Sport Club is an album that enriches and expands the theme of one of the most significant exhibitions organized by the MARe Library, dedicated to the visual exploration of sports in Romanian fine arts.

This Library exhibition is an innovation in the landscape of Romanian art history, being the first of its kind focused exclusively on the thematic interpretation of sports. The exhibition tracks the evolution of the interaction between sports and art, and how they have influenced and modernized our society for over a century. The album highlights the preference for swimming and rowing characteristic of the Balcic School, the avant-garde’s fascination with boxing and aviation, and illustrates how socialist realism and the official communist art promoted an athletic vision of sports for four decades. Contemporary art, with its introspective and often critical approach, treats sports as an iconic symbol of mass culture, as well as its transformation into a virtual phenomenon (mediatized through television, internet, electronic games) and the impact on body image in the context of social pressures to achieve an ideal of perfection and health (sports as a means of fitness), playing a prominent role in this exhibition.