Suprainfinit at RAD Fair Bucharest
We are thrilled to participate in the second edition of RAD Art Fair Bucharest with a daring dialogue amongst young, mid-career and established artists working across painting and sculpture, namely: Hyesu Jeong (KR), Sultana Maitec (RO), Gili Mocanu (RO), Vlad Nanca (RO), and Larisa Sitar (RO).
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Binding Hyesu Jeong’s practice over the past five years is her astounding capacity to make those very simple emotions of loneliness, emptiness, and laziness persistent yet unfamiliar. Employing a colourful visual language, the artist allows for negative spaces to breathe by creating frames for the unfolding of interior and exterior landscapes. Hyesu Jeong (b.1995) is currently based in Düsseldorf and due to graduate in summer 2024 from the Painting Department of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Larisa Sitar's artistic practice often focuses on the intersection of architecture and art, centred around the ornament as a sociopolitical statement. One of the main materials used by the artist is concrete, a material with powerful visual legacy (through modernism, social realism, brutalism), as well as one that bears the capacity of fostering vegetal life. Linked to the aspect of nostalgia in her creation, the bas-relief technique is used by the artists in a rather reflective, subversive and open way to evoke specific cultural associations.
Gili Mocanu (b.1971, Constanta, Romania) is considered one of the most acclaimed conceptual painters in Romania. Between abstractionism and conceptualism, his paintings transform the canvas surface into realms of unearthly desires. His works construct non/spaces, at the confluence of non/meaning and non/matter. The indeterminate nature of Gili’s geometrical structures gives the paintings the possibility to multiply three-dimensionally in a myriad number of ways, in an absurd construction of space and time, a possible nonreality that floats outside the canvas.
Sultana Maitec was a Romanian painter and graphic artist, trained in the school of realist figurative art of the 1950’s. When socialist ideology tried to take control of artistic discourse, Sultana Maitec managed to maintain a distinct, individual profile. Living in the so-called “golden age” of Romanian communism, the artist chose gold as her medium of expression, thereby protecting her work from any interference from ideological censorship. She positioned herself as a non-figurative painter and chose her own path of resistance against the dominant ideology of her time.
With works spanning the past two decades, Vlad Nancă’s recurrent use of grids, ceramic tiles, mosaic, houseplants, mirrors, and slightly distorted vernacular objects from Socialist Romania set numerous layers of history and materiality in motion. "The figures loosely defined in Vlad Nancă’s works, pre-figured in ruptures of architectural rhythm and order, dramatise the parlay between corporeal templates and spatial confines: the mold of a hand emerges from a tiled wall that functions as a backbone for the absent body [...]" (fragment from Mihnea Mircan's text about the Horizontal Wall, a duo exhibition by Vlad Nanca and Bora Baboçi).
