The exhibition Closed Doors, Open Envelopes. Iosif Király – Early Works, 1975 – 2000 proposes the presentation of the early artistic activity of Iosif Király under the sign of recovery and critical revision. According to the artist’s testimony, the title refers to the fact that most of the actions and works presented in this exhibition happened not in public spaces, but in private ones, behind closed doors or in any case without spectators. The great majority of the works were not exhibited at that time, since, back then, they were assumed and intended for an audience from another place or time. However, the envelopes – a tangible testimony of mail-art – represented an opening to the “true” world that the artist could only imagine and which he knew only indirectly. At the same time, towards the end of the 1980s, envelopes began to be tracked by the Securitate (Department of State Security), they were opened and/or stopped off their way before reaching the recipient.
This is why mail-art is a significant landmark, an important pole of the exhibition, presented in a distinctive space. There are exhibited photographs, drawings, and objects that are made in a chronological range which fits into recent history: the 1970s and 1980s (with some significant extensions in the last decade of the last century). If we look back from a present perspective, the years after 1990 are an extension and a conclusion of the paradigm that began in 1975, being, at the same time, the years of a real opening and penetration in the international artistic context and of orientation towards the themes that would dominate Király’s creation until today (time, memory, archive etc.) or to activities as educator and project initiator.
