Press Release

S.M.A.K. presents a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Ana Lupas, one of the leading artists from Eastern Europe. Conceived in the final phase of Lupas’s life and career, the exhibition traces nearly seven decades of her multifaceted body of work, shaped by a sustained engagement with craft, ritual and communal forms of artistic practice. The exhibition also features works by artist S P A T A R U, with whom she shared a lifelong personal and artistic dialogue.

International ongoing exhibitions

Ana Lupas, On Ritual Time

S.M.A.K., Ghent (Belgium)

10.10.2026- 21.02.2027

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Ana Lupas (b. 1940, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) began working with textiles in the early 1960s. Drawing on inherited techniques such as weaving, sewing, knotting and braiding, Lupas pushed beyond the boundaries of the medium and extended her textile art into three-dimensional forms, at a time when Fiber Art was emerging as an artistic movement. A monumental presentation of her earliest textile works, Prapori 1961–1964, comprising 53 free-standing textile works never displayed in their entirety, is one of the exhibition’s highlights.

Lupas continued to expand the formal possibilities of art through collective actions, collaborations with rural communities, and monumental in situ projects, considered as early experiments of art as a social practice, such as Wreaths of August and Humid Installation. While intersecting with performance, action, and Land Art, her work remains deeply rooted in the cultural and historical context of Transylvania and took shape under Romania’s communist regime, amid censorship, surveillance, and propaganda.

For Lupas, the new can only emerge from what has been. Time is an essential dimension of her work. In addition to the production of new work, Lupas regularly revisits and reconfigures existing works, letting them evolve with changing social and political contexts. A similar cyclical understanding of artistic production shapes the exhibition, which brings together rarely exhibited works; some presented in new configurations. The inclusion of works by S P A T A R U (Mircea Spătaru, 1937-2011) further opens the exhibition toward questions of transmission, loss and continuity. On Ritual Time therefore becomes more than an art-historical presentation: it can be comprehended as a ritual act in its own right, remembering and sustaining life through art.

This is Lupas’s first institutional exhibition in Belgium and is accompanied by the publication of a monograph dedicated to her oeuvre, a co-production between Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; and S.M.A.K.

Curated by Tanja Boon.

Exhibition 10 October 2026 - 21 February 2027. S.M.A.K., Jan Hoetplein 1 - Ghent, 9000 (Belgium). Hours: Tuesday–Friday 9:30am–5:30pm, Saturday–Sunday 10am–6pm

Ana Lupas, Prapori, 1961–1964 (Funeral Flags). Studio view. Photo: © Carlo Favero.