Ana Cristea Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of the paintings and drawings of Romanian artist Bogdan Vladuta. This will be the first time that Vladuta’s work will be shown in the United States. Born, raised, and trained in Bucharest, the city where he still lives, Vladuta has created a body of work that is inseparable from his post-Communist urban milieu. His oeuvre reflects the people and places that surround him and make up the fabric of his world, a world which is saturated with the physical and psychic remains of its recent (and not so recent) history.

Portraits, self-portraits, urban landscapes—in various forms, Vladuta’s paintings and drawings all share an interest in subtly exposing the ways in which the past lies just beneath the surface of the present. Vibrant, bust-length portraits of living citizens of Bucharest, including Vladuta, his wife Mirela, and his artist-friend Ioan Grigorescu, are juxtaposed with drawings of bare skulls. Similarly, relatively straightforward depictions of Bucharest’s buildings are juxtaposed with depictions in which apartment blocks are rendered as conglomerations of wooden coffins.

Like many of his Eastern-European contemporaries, Vladuta employs a painterly style underpinned by a rigorous, academic training in the fundamentals of painting. His palette has some of the somber blacks and grays often associated with the painting coming out of his part of the world, but it is enlivened by a parallel affinity for patches of vivid color.

Vladuta has described his process as akin to that of an “archeologist”; he attempts to uncover the meaning of artifacts (including human artifacts) that live on in spite of the disappearance of their original context.

Bogdan Vladuta was born in 1971 in Bucharest, Romania. He studied painting at Bucharest’s Academy of Fine Art and is now a Senior Lecturer there. He was the recipient of the Vasile Parvan Grant, resulting in a two-year residency at the Accademia di Romania in Rome, Italy (2002-2004). In 2009, he co-founded the Bucharest gallery Recycle Nest, a contemporary art space devoted to the promotion of contemporary Romanian art. In 2007, Vladuta had a one-man exhibition, titled “Death to Rome!”, at the National Museum of the Arts in Cluj, Romania. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions in Vienna (“EAST by SOUTH WEST”, Gallerie Mezzanin, 2011), Frankfurt am Main (“PAINTING (RO)MANIA”, European Central Bank, 2009), and Bucharest (“Funeraria”, National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011).

For additional information, please contact Ana Cristea Gallery by phone at (212) 904-1100 or by e-mail at [email protected] The gallery is located at 521 West 26th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues and is open from Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 6pm.