Acces liber
2026
The title METAPHORA references the Greek origin of the word—metaphora, which means “transfer” or “transport.” Composed of meta (“beyond”) and pherein (“to carry”), the term suggests the idea of displacing meaning from one place to another.
The METAPHORA exhibition proposes a visual foray into the complexity of symbolic thinking, where the image becomes a carrier of multiple meanings. In this meeting space between the visible and the invisible, the exhibition explores the mechanisms through which significations are dislocated, superimposed, and regenerated in a continuous play of translating sense.
Metaphor is not merely a poetic tool, but a fundamental structure of knowledge; it functions as a link between experience and expression, between the personal and the universal, between the real and the imaginary. Whether through subtle plastic gestures, radical visual constructions, or symbolically charged objects, each work becomes an open statement—a code susceptible to infinite decodings.
The exhibition offers a polyphonic discourse in which the metaphor functions as a form of resistance, an instrument for probing intimacy. It invites the viewer into an exercise of active interpretation, challenging them to accept ambiguity as an aesthetic and cognitive resource. Thus, Metaphora becomes more than just a title; it is a process—a way of seeing, feeling, and understanding the world through cultural artifacts.
Artiști
Adelina Ivan
Adelina Ivan works in a variety of media, from textile installations and painting to video, in search of new forms of more fluid relationship between domestic and public space, urban and natural or social space. Her artistic approach has geometry as a symbolic space of resistance against structures of power and dominant environments in relation to personal history and social abstraction. Ivan uses geometric motifs, historically employed by women in techniques such as sewing, braiding, and weaving, as well as patterns from the textile industry. Through reduction and layering, the textile fragments – ubiquitous objects in intimate proximity to bodies and domestic spaces – function as carriers of both personal and collective narratives. She exhibited at Kunsthalle Seinäjoki, Finland (2025), Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (2024), Plastic Contemporary, Cluj (2024), EWERK Luckenwalde Berlin (2022), Contextile Biennial, Portugal (2022), MNAC Bucharest (2022), MARe Museum of Recent Art Bucharest (2021), Sandwich Bucharest (2021), Musé e de la Chasse et de la Nature Paris (2019), Spinnerei Leipzig (2019), Kunsthalle Bega (2019), Tokio Art Screening Festival (2019), MNAR Bucharest (2019), MNAC Bucharest (2018), Media Art Festival Arad (2018), Artissima Torino (2018), Anca Poteraș u Gallery Bucharest (2018), tranzit .ro / bucureș ti (2017), Jean-Claude Mayer Gallery Frankfurt (2017). Salzburg Residency (2018) / ERSTE Foundation Grant – Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Austria, Grundarfjö rður Residency (2021) / SEE Grant – Grundarfjö rður Iceland, Contextile Residency (2022) / Creative Europe Platform “Magic Carpets” EU Grant, Guimarã es Portugal.
Albert Kaan
Albert Kaan is an artist who works across a wide range of forms, from sculpture, installation, drawing to photography, video and performance. His work is both presented locally and internationally in multiple contexts, with a emphasis on working in the public space, the works are often brought into galleries in the form of photographs, videos and objects. His
practice relies on the performance of living life and transforming the artists personal space into a shared playground for the public. Born in Romania a few years after the fall of the Communist Regime, he is currently based in Bucharest and the rural area of Gulia.
Ana Avram
(born 1999, living and working in Cluj-Napoca, România)
Through her artistic practice she proposes the negotiation of reality, in spatial contexts, through installations and sculptures situated at the border of materiality and meta-reality. She gravitates towards peculiar juxtapositions of familiar objects and elements, which represent the product of mediating internal scenographies, within the limits imposed by physicality. Ana strongly believes in intuitive creation and research, which are delivered form a subconscious cumulus – the creative process being a sincere attempt of bringing to the surface and clarifying.
Ana-Suzana Ionescu
Ana Ionescu (b.1999, Bucharest) is a sculptor working and living in London, graduating from Royal College of Art in 2025 on the MA Sculpture programme. She is primarily active in both UK and Romania. Her practice is deeply rooted in the idea of materiality, its subtleties but also the curious combinations resulted in the process. Exploring the physical properties and their resonance, she aims to uncover the poetic potential that lies within. Focused on evoking a feeling rather than imposing a specific message, the work finds itself in a transitory state between reality and otherworldliness. A reoccurring motif is the inherent duality of the material world, and the attractiveness of two binary opposite elements coexisting. Shape, dimension and ergonomics bring bodily and
sculptural matter together. Juxtaposing the previously mentioned and occasionally intertwining them with the abject or fragility, the physical form becomesmes the manifestation of visual desire.
Andreea Itu
Andreea is studying in the first year of the master’s degree program at the National University of Arts Bucharest, department of ceramics, glass and metal, bachelor graduate in the same major. Through glass, Andreea explores psychological patterns and social issues, addressing themes like inequality, vulnerability, human fragility and introspection. By exploring uncomfortable matters, the artist invites the viewer to face their own challenges.
Aurora Mititelu
Aurora Mititelu is an artist based between Los Angeles and Bucharest, working with computational images, AI, and physical installations to examine how digital media structures contemporary reality. She holds an MFA in Media Arts from UCLA and is currently a member of NEW INC Y12, the cultural incubator of the New Museum in New York. Shaped by a post-communist Romanian context during a period of increasing American media influence, her work explores the relationship between the virtual and the organic, investigating how technological mediation reconfigures intimacy, identity, and autonomy.
Darius Iova
Darius Iova (b. 2000, Oradea) is a visual artist who in his work explores themes such as the memory of personal identity, often using media such as the family archive and photography. Darius studied the Photo-Video master’s program at the University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. His
works have been present in exhibitions in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest, always exploring the relationship between the past, the present and the way memory is visually preserved.
Dimitrie Luca Gora
An artist born and raised in Bucharest and a social activist, he graduated from the Photo-Video department in 2023 with the bachelor’s project “The Speech Therapy Room.” He works across various artistic forms, including photography, video, installations, painting, and sculpture, using creativity to support social and artistic causes.
Gabriel Barbu
Gabriel Barbu (30) is a visual designer based in Bucharest and a graduate of the Faculty of Decorative Arts and Design at the National University of Arts Bucharest. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with numerous local institutions, particularly within the cultural sector, developing visual identities, editorial materials, and multidisciplinary projects.He also completed a short study period in Berlin (2016–2017), an experience that broadened his perspective on contemporary design and enriched his visual approach. Passionate about editorial design and photography, Gabriel continuously explores new visual and narrative directions. In recent years, he has expanded his practice into the electronic music scene, working as a DJ and event organizer, contributing to the growth of creative communities and fostering a dialogue between visual design and music.
https://www.instagram.com/gbrlbrb/
Lucian Bran
Lucian’s interdisciplinary approach to landscape photography employs cynicism and sentimentality to undermine the ideological constructs that shape our perception of the surrounding world. His distinctive style is marked by self-reflective photographic series that focus on the medium’s contribution to the material culture of both global and local geographic imagination. In addition to photographic experiments, Lucian’s recent works include objects, sculptures, and installations, reinforcing the tension between representation and reality. Lucian Bran (b. 1981) graduated from the National University of Arts – Photography Department, Bucharest. His works have been exhibited at Sandwich Gallery, Bucharest (2024), U10 Belgrade (2024), The Balcony, The Hague (2024), Art Quarter Budapest (2024), Artissima Art Fair, Turin (2023), the Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest (2023), the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2023, 2018), Iomo Gallery, Bucharest (2022), ElectroPutere Gallery, Craiova (2021), Borderline Artspace, Iași (2021, 2018), Fotogalerie Wien (2018), Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest (2016), Posibilă Gallery, Bucharest (2015, 2013), the Museum of Municipal Engineering – Krakow Photomonth – Show OFF (2014). He was selected for Plat(t)form – Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019) and nominated for The Unseen ING Talent Award (2016).
Matei Băcanu
Matei Băcanu is a designer and artist from Bucharest. Having begun his career as an architect, his desire to move beyond functional representation and real-world limitations pushed him toward digital media. Here, he pursues a more open exploration of form and space. His work examines relationships between structure and softness, material and void, geometry and flow. Over the years, his shift toward time-based media has allowed him to intimately explore motion, rhythm, and narrative structures, opening up new dimensions of expression and enabling multiple collaborations with sound artists and musicians. Today, his practice is a continuous, dynamic negotiation of the evocative work that lies just beyond design.
Mihai Grecu
Mihai Grecu is a visual artist born in Romania and based in Paris. Trained at Le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts, he works at the intersection of experimental film, animation, AI, and visual arts. His practice explores themes such as collective memory, geopolitics, and the impact of technology on perception. His works have been presented at festivals, biennials, and contemporary art spaces around the world.
Miruna Nica
Miruna Nica (b. 2003) is a Romanian new media artist whose work explores the fragmented and deeply systemic roots of pleasure, domination & submission in a posthuman world. She reflects on themes like alienation or the fluidity of identity by being both deeply vulnerable and eerily distant. Miruna works with media such as installations incorporating shibari, performative &generative sound, and moving image.
Nikita Dembinski
Born and based in Bucharest, Nikita Dembinski is a musician and visual artist. He studied musical composition and classical piano at the „George Enescu” National College of Music and the National University of Music Bucharest, then later graduated his bachelor degree in photography at the National University of Arts Bucharest. His visual practice was grounded in a sustained inquiry about reality, focusing on the theatricality of everyday life. Dembinski began his career in photojournalism before shifting toward constructed and staged imagery. His works have frequently appeared in exhibitions accompanied by his own ambient compositions, thus marking the beginning of his musical project, Kadjavsi. Since then, Kadjavsi evolved into an alternative-rock project with two studio albums, most recently „Above Albatross”, that was released in the fall of 2025. Dembinski currently works primarily as a musician and composer for his personal project but also for theatre and film.
Paul Moldovan
Paul Moldovan (b. 1996, Romania) is a sculptor based in Cluj-Napoca and Târgu Mureș. His practice operates at the intersection of art and science, exploring contrasts between the organic and the industrial, the visible and the invisible, appearance and material reality. Through the project Organic, Industrial, Uncanny, in which organic materials such as sponge are transformed into brass or aluminum, his works question the perception of form, weight, and texture. Paul is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca and completed a semester of studies at the Universidad del País Vasco in Bilbao. His interest in the invisible forces that shape the physical world is reflected in a process-oriented sculptural approach and material experimentation. Through the project Invisible Field, magnetism becomes both subject and working method, making tensions, balances, and states of suspension perceptible. Formally oscillating between monumentality and intimacy, his works create situations in which fragility, ephemerality, and weightlessness coexist with rigid industrial structures.
Răzvan Bungărdean
Paul Moldovan (b. 1996, Romania) is a sculptor based in Cluj-Napoca and Târgu Mureș. His practice operates at the intersection of art and science, exploring contrasts between the organic and the industrial, the visible and the invisible, appearance and material reality. Through the project Organic, Industrial, Uncanny, in which organic materials such as sponge are transformed into brass or aluminum, his works question the perception of form, weight, and texture. Paul is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca and completed a semester of studies at the Universidad del País Vasco in Bilbao. His interest in the invisible forces that shape the physical world is reflected in a process-oriented sculptural approach and material experimentation. Through the project Invisible Field, magnetism becomes both subject and working method, making tensions, balances, and states of suspension perceptible. Formally oscillating between monumentality and intimacy, his works create situations in which fragility, ephemerality, and weightlessness coexist with rigid industrial structures.
Ștefania Iakab
Ștefania Iakab is a sculptor trained at the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara, where she completed both her BA and MA studies in Sculpture and Ceramics. Her artistic practice focuses on exploring material and symbolic contrasts, with a sustained interest in the tension between the natural and the artificial. She works with a wide range of materials, but the core elements of her work are animal hides and synthetic resins. These are combined in ways that generate a visual language defined by tension and coherence, where matter itself plays an active role in shaping meaning. The resulting objects are hybrid, unsettling, simultaneously familiar and alien. They evoke recognizable forms yet remain unclassifiable, occupying an intermediate space between cultural memory and imagined projection.
Through these combinations of textures, forms, and materials, Iakab constructs a visual dialogue inspired by posthumanist scenarios, in which myth, certainty, and fragments of an archaic world coexist in unstable configurations. Her aesthetic is defined by duality – disruptive yet natural, artificial yet archaic – held in a constant state of tension between decay and construction, between discomfort and visual seduction.
Setup
Robert Marin
A cofondat în 2001 biroul de design și arhitectură Square One în care a activat ca arhitect principal, a cofondat în 2008 biroul de design și arhitectură Nuca Studio în care activează și în prezent ca arhitect principal.
Cîteva distincții și participări la evenimente importante: Premiul 1 pentru arhitectură de interior al BAB, Premiul Henkel pentru Artă, participare la expoziția Nature Design pentru Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich, lucrări publicate în cărți și reviste de specialitate editate de Frame Publishers, Taschen, Lars Muller Publishers, Gestalten.
Curator
Marian Pălie
Marian Pălie (b. 1978) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. From an early age, he developed an interest in contemplative aesthetics, an inclination supported by his subsequent studies in philosophy, theology, and cultural anthropology. He holds a degree in philosophy and theology with a thesis on “Post-Anticipations of Modernity,” a master’s degree in fashion and costume strategies (2013), and a PhD in Visual Arts from the National University of Arts in Bucharest.