Gallery Portrait
Plan B

It is undeniable that gallery work requires considerable planning and foresight. In reality, however, it doesn’t take long for things to turn out differently than expected. Plan B Gallery’s Mihaela Lutea sees a lot of positives in the accidental, which often becomes a decisive factor: “What we are doing is actually an adventure. In the gallery, you never really know what is going to happen—that’s what is exciting about it.” Lutea is not only referring to the exhibitions that are created in collaboration with artists, but also to the gallery enterprise itself.

The adventure called Plan B started in 2005, in the Romanian city of Cluj. Located in the northwest of the country, in the region of Transylvania, Cluj was the breeding ground for a generation of Romanian artists that soon found success in the international art market, particularly but not only in the field of painting: Adrian Ghenie should be mentioned, as well as Victor Man, Ciprian Muresan, Serban Savu and many more. By the time they met again in their hometown, what they were still missing was a place to show their art.

Mihai Pop, who to this day runs the gallery with Lutea, teamed up with Adrian Ghenie following a suggestion by Victor Man to do something about it. They founded Plan B as an artist-run gallery—and at a “historically good moment,” as Lutea describes it. Even though there was a general interest in art from Eastern Europe, it was represented by very few galleries. From then on, everything happened quite quickly: Plan B participated in its first art fair, the Viennafair, not even a year after being founded. This was followed a few months later by the Armory Show in New York and Liste Basel.

The next step had to be a second location in a European city with an active art scene. “At the time, Berlin was really the only option,” Lutea says. She jumped on the Berlin bandwagon herself. Lutea was still a student at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) when she met Pop in Venice, and in 2008, when Plan B opened its first Berlin space on Heidestraße, where a large number of galleries and project spaces had settled by the end of the 2000s, she found herself already in a responsible position.

Soon a second focal point crystallized, which is now the core concern in Cluj: the study and preservation of the history of Romanian art in the last 60 years. One of the historical practices whose estate the gallery manages is, for instance, that of Horia Damian (1922-2012), whose cosmic and spiritually-charged sculptural work, often bearing monumental dimensions, was able to become more intimately known by an international audience thanks to Plan B. And in an impressive way: for Art Basel Unlimited, the gallery reconstructed a twelve-meter-tall sculpture from 1972. Lutea emphasizes that within such projects art history feels like a living archive. 

The Berlin gallery has also continued to evolve: after locations on Heidestraße and Potsdamer Straße, Plan B moved into a new space on Strausberger Platz in 2023. With its relocation to the landmarked Haus Berlin, the gallery opened a new chapter in its history in the German capital.

Even today, most of the represented artists have Romanian roots, although not exclusively. Plan B wants to remain active, in motion, since “as a gallery, you are always reconsidering your program, negotiating between old and new realities.”