“Oblivion”, Anca Bodea, Suzana Dan, Ioana Olahut, Simona Vilau

The workshop is for work, frustration, and taming it.

Words are to crystallize things you’ve intuited and already put into your art.

Straight lines are for sketching.

Blue is to calm the other primary colors.

Vulnerability is to still be imprinted by what surrounds you.

Admiration among artists is to truly enjoy what others have done/seen/discovered.

Forgetting is to start anew.

With these lines in mind, more sensed than put into words, Ioana Olăhuț embarked on assembling this exhibition. Because she’ve closely followed their work over the years and admired the creations of her three invited guests, Anca Bodea, Suzana Dan, and Simona Vilău, whether from up close or from afar. Besides their studio work, they are artists who have dedicated time, energy, and empathy to bridge the gap between artists and the public, creating a common language of understanding, to recover valuable artists and make their practice as intelligible as possible, or to promote young talents at the beginning of their journey.

Anca Bodea lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. Her professional status is divided between that of an independent artist and a professor at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where she has been teaching painting since 2014. The constant subjects explored in her work are boundaries, solitude, immersion, all brought together under a common technical denominator: oil painting.

Suzana Dan, a visual artist and cultural manager, emerged in the early 2000s challenging local art structures. She initiated the White Night of the Galleries (NAG) in 2007, a landmark event in Romania’s contemporary culture. As the executive director of Ephemair Association since 2011, she has led over 70 cultural programs. In 2016, she played a key role in opening the Rezidența9 contemporary culture center. Serving as its manager since 2018, Suzana continues to spearhead various projects and events, contributing significantly to contemporary art initiatives within Foundation9. She currently resides and works in Bucharest.

Ioana Olăhuț is an artist, educator, and the director of the Painting Department at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. Her works are visual reflections on the fragile boundary between natural and artificial, on metamorphoses and rites of passage, whether biological, psychological, or social in nature, revealing a world of existential edges. Ioana is the initiator and co-author of the digital platform dedicated to contemporary art, Hassium.ro, and the president of the Hassium Cultural Association, through which she carries out multidisciplinary projects.

Simona Vilău is an artist and curator who lives and works in Bucharest. She is the author of a doctoral thesis on violence in contemporary Romanian art and has been working at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest since 2019. Her artistic practice is consistent, as she is interested in questioning the relationship between the body and society, subjectivity and mental illness, as well as the recurrence of major themes.