Ana Cristea Gallery is proud to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Romanian artist Bogdan Vladuta.

A series of confessions, discoveries, and ethereal vignettes, Bogdan Vladuta’s canvases invite us to contemplate location and architecture as a memory space. Places, and the spaces they occupy, house the psychic remains of past encounters. Following bodies of work that explored the post-Communist urban milieu of Romania, and Bucharest in particular, Vladuta expands his examination of the past’s psychic genealogy to uncover stories and histories that are simultaneously further reaching and more intimate than previous urban studies. Referents ranging from Piero della Francesca, Palladian architecture and Van Gogh to universal symbols like the staircase explore a diverse wealth of history (Classicism, Renaissance, Post-Impressionist) and how places and people become embedded with the unique fibers of heritage that precede them.

Many of the large canvases serve as studies into individuals, as well as recordings of the stains of a collective unconscious. Vladuta employs the Renaissance polyhedron as a symbol, not unlike the halo, reflecting the unseen energy of the works’ inhabitants. And it is this energy and the subjects’ individuated tones of experience, which flood the canvases with their light hues and subtle colors or their eerie dark backgrounds. The enclosed spaces, blurred and wall-less rooms (as seen in “The Man Imitating Van Gogh”) and undetermined open locales (“Ladder”) alternate simultaneously as archives of remembered scenes and dramas forever imprinted upon their geography, and as structures of memory. The rooms seem to reflect our cognitive constructions - walls erected as defenses and as preservers of intimacy, of otherworldly moments tragically trapped within the confines of time. Vladuta captures their hue, revealing the tangible remnants of long-forgotten memories, those artifacts, which all too often, go unnoticed.

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 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 exhibitions in Paris (“Romanian Scenes,” Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, 2013), Budapest, (“The Naked Man,” Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2013), London (“The Continuation of Romance,” Rosenfeld Porcini, 2013), 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).