Ioan Șerban
Ioan Șerban was born in Sibiu in 1955. He emigrated to the United States in 1983, where he spent two decades at the center of one of the most charged periods in American art.
His entry into the art world came through the theatre — he wrote and directed experimental plays in New York drawing on the manifestos of Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, and Hans Arp, staging works that treated Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstraction not as historical movements but as live problems. It was a natural step from the stage to the gallery: both are rooms in which something is asked of you.
Through the 1980s and 1990s he worked with Vorpal Gallery in SoHo — situated directly across from the galleries of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, and beside Mary Boone — during the years when Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel were making the street feel like the future of painting. He went on to collaborate with Foster Goldstrom Gallery, and with dealers Patrice Landau and Elga Wimmer, advising on the openings of Elga Wimmer Gallery and Stendhal Gallery, and working in curatorial roles across numerous exhibitions. Vorpal Gallery during those years was also the platform that introduced the world to Yozo Hamaguchi — the Japanese printmaker who redefined mezzotint — and deepened the visibility of M.C. Escher.
Among the more remarkable chapters of those years: he was entrusted by Jerry Brewster of Brewster Gallery to accompany Leonora Carrington during her visits to New York — one of the founding figures of Surrealism, and the companion of Max Ernst.