Maria Balea
bio
Maria Balea (b. 1990) is a Romanian artist living and working in Cluj-Napoca. Her work encompasses painting and object-making, collage and installation. In her practice a delicate process of observation is extended to include myth-beliefs, memory, and interior imagining. Fascinated by discrete life rhythms persisting against the noise of everyday turmoil, her painterly landscapes rummage through the subconscious. Borrowing from female surrealist tradition and its alchemical symbolism where human and nature dissolve into each other, surfaces in her paintings vacillate inconclusively between solid and fluid, micro and macro, dense and ephemeral in permutations often surprisingly reminiscent of digital aesthetics.
Balea graduated from the University of Art and Design, Cluj-Napoca and is the co-founder of Superliquidato, an alternative artist run space for digital and experimental media springing from the internet, and active between 2014-2017 within the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca.
Her works have been exhibited in art spaces and galleries such as The Paintbrush Factory, Aici Acolo, Matca artspace in Cluj-Napoca, Centrul Artelor Vizuale Multimedia, Pavilion and Goodbuy Gallery in Bucharest or Fort Delta Gallery in Melbourne.
George Crîngașu
bio
George Crîngașu lives and works between Rome (Italy) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania). Growing up alongside the first sprouts of internet culture, digital media and digital tools, his practice is largely focused on these mediums. Heavily imbued with motifs from art history, his works depict fantastic inner (or maybe just alien or parallel) wolds, immediate and intimate surroundings, scenes reminiscent of gaming environments, sometimes the bizarre plain and simple. They often take the form of digital prints, but in line with their intention as idealised installations, spaces that you should navigate given the chance, Crîngașu frequently also branches out into video, installation and object-oriented works.
His formal training is deeply rooted in the traditional paradigms of art making (painting, drawing, etching), hence the constant probing of the ever more permeable interface between the analog and the digital space, never attempting to merge the two but rather searching for cracks, looking at how and when one could populate/possess the other.
He was born in 1988 in Focșani, Romania, and has studied at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. The artist’s work has been exhibited in galleries and venues such as Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest, ArtCologne in Cologne, Digital Art Festival in Athens, CFHILL in Stockholm and Liste Art Fair in Basel.
