Art Museum trophy

Gabriela Culic, 1965, Romania

Lives and works in Romania

Graduated from the National University of Arts, Bucharest, Romania, Painting Department

Important exhibitions: Belgium, France, Netherlands, Romania, USA

Works in public collections: Romania

Works in private collections: Belgium, Canada, France, Israel, Netherlands, Romania, United Kingdom, USA

“For the coldness of colours, we dress ourselves in light and our only true coat is the entrails of our eyes. For the rest of the time, we are naked or undressing...”, Nichita Stănescu writes in Respirări (Breaths), thoughts that inspire me. The Breath cycle, on which I have worked over the last years, focuses on birds and flight. For me, the art of painting is an ideal, it’s like a mirror in which to adjust your face, “until you accept to be”, as the poet says. My search in painting has a philosophical meaning. “Everything she does is uplifting, it is transcendence”, emphasises Radu Boroianu, the curator of the Breath exhibition. “It disturbs you, it makes you go through apparently conflicting states of mind, and ends up by chaining you. The painting of Gabriela Culic conveys a painful, yet playful, jesting charm. It is as much a scream of loneliness, as it is tender sharing. Feverish, ultimate sensuality and religious reflection...” The austere range of colours, the refinement of the shades of gray, the game of transparencies, the pictorial imperfections conceptually support the cycle of Breath paintings, providing the ephemeral with strength and certainty. It becomes beautiful just because it vanishes fast.