Florin Zhu
2025
“Passage” – a collection of fragments from Florin Zhu’s series “The Rediscovered Garden” – is a metaphor for inspiration as a place, a poetic form of metamorphosing fantasy into reality. Essential attributes of humanity are questioned in the artist’s spiritual journey through the “garden” he revisits, to which he rhythmically returns, in a spiral of self-discovery that ascends with each passage. Harmony and chaos, Utopia and dystopia coexist in the Garden. “The Rediscovered Garden” is much more than a natural continuation of his 2024 show, “Shadows from the Inner Garden.” There are numerous common elements of artistic intention: the garden as a place of introspection, of self-cultivation, the garden as a multi-sensory and synesthetic space. However, since last year, the artist has added new meanings to his “garden,” which he constructs as a symbol of time regained, in a Proustian manner, a place of spiritual construction, an allegory of meticulously crafted refuge, a mirror of the past without which we cannot order and understand the present. The Garden’s relationship with the exterior has not changed, but has evolved. Zhu’s characters have multiplied at the boundary between figurative and abstract, their humanity dissolving with the disappearance of human outlines – in antithesis to Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” where pleasure transforms into debauchery with an evidently human face.
Florin Zhu’s exhibition is a poem imagined in harsh planes (often contrasting with the supple, shiny elements of brass or glass), the artist using lines and surfaces to create spatial drawings in which the palpable sense of form anticipates the slide into abstraction. Nature and geometry coexist symbiotically and harmoniously in Zhu’s sculptures, as they do in the garden.
Artist
Florin Zhu
A graduate of the National University of Arts in Bucharest (Master’s in 2021) and an associate member of the Union of Visual Artists (since 2020), Florin Zhu (born in Bucharest, 1997) has participated in numerous group exhibitions since 2018, in national and international contemporary art biennials, and has three solo exhibitions in Bucharest, at “Galateca” (2022), “Gallery 15,” and “Art Cell” (2024). He is already present in the secondary art market, his works having been publicly auctioned several times. Zhu has been nominated in competitions; he received the second prize in the Juventus competition “The Culture of Fragment or the Dislocation of the Gaze,” Triade Foundation, Timisoara, 2019, and the third prize in the Gheorghe Petraşcu Biennial Plastic Arts Competition, 15th edition, 2020. He lives and works in Bucharest.
“My recent concerns have been channeled towards analyzing modulated compositions, containing fragments and other compositional elements in ceramics, metal, and wax, with the theme of continuity, creativity, and the fragmented image of the moment, with a broad symbolism related to man’s present and future,” states Florin Zhu.
Curator
Cristina Simion
Curator and gallerist Cristina Simion has conceived and organized over a hundred solo and group exhibitions (especially of contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, mostly from Romania), in Nuremberg, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, Sintra, Bucharest, Ljubljana, Brussels, Chisinau, Bled, Brasov, Sibiu, Cluj, Iasi, Timisoara, Suceava, Bayreuth, Smarje, Schmerikon. With a special interest in new figurative art, she has written, edited, and coordinated art catalogs and albums and published numerous articles. Since 2012, she has been based in Nuremberg, Germany, where she runs the Tiny Griffon Gallery. In 2019 and 2021, she was co-curator of the Brasov International Visual Arts Biennial. With a doctorate in the management of non-standard industries and over two decades of experience prior to her curatorial career – in management, journalism, and communication – Cristina Simion also completed the International Curatorship courses organized by NODE Center for Curatorial Studies Berlin in 2018-2019, and in 2022, the Art Collection Management courses (also at NODE Center for Curatorial Studies Berlin) and Introduction to Art and Finance at Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York.
She has lectured, especially on topics related to artistic management, at Civitella d’Agliano, Horasis Global Meeting, the Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, and Transilvania University of Brasov. In 2022, through Tiny Griffon Gallery, she was a partner in the international project “Artists at Risk,” artistic residencies for Ukrainian artists.”