Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening of the Gentle is the Night, Soul is the Garden exhibition by the artist Diana Oțet on Friday, July 5, at 6:00 p.m.
With an intense artistic and pedagogical activity, Diana Oțet returns to the gallery Scemtovici & Benowitz for the second time. Smaller colored graphics on wood plywood and large canvases painted in oil colors, the works created between 2019 and 2024 (most of them unpublished) are brought together under the title Gentle is the Night, Soul is the Garden.
The creative approach of Diana Oțet is described by Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu, the curator of the exhibition, as follows: “The exhibited works, colored graphics of smaller sizes made on wooden plywood and large canvases painted in oil colors, are thematically articulated on certain concerns of the artist, offering a glimpse into her personal universe: the garden, the intimate and familiar setting that includes portraits, small zoological compositions and nightscapes. Each series brings to the fore details that suggest states of meditation and introspection, and the subjects that Diana Oțet uses in her artistic practice are timeless, seemingly insignificant encounters: the night and its goodness, interior landscapes within the house, landscapes and details from nature, recomposed elements from the world of non-speakers. All this, even if timeless, can be found in our current reality, recognizable through the elements of clothing, the style of the hair, the physical appearance of the characters, as well as through the formal and chromatic approach.[…]”
Diana Oțet (b. 1987) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, graduated from UAD, Department of Graphics, and is currently a university lecturer at the same institution. Particularly concerned with the expressive potential of drawing and painting, she translates into narrative scenes, intimate, personal fragments, thoughts, emotions and moods or constructs visual metaphors in which she addresses inner challenges of a spiritual nature. Her artistic practice refers to universal themes: motherhood, the timeless transposed intimate setting, transfigured gardens, and elements of nature. The artist is concerned with simple and apparently banal objects, actions and fragments of reality, which obsessively permeate her thoughts, with fragmentary scenes that she represents in an attempt to give them a metaphysical dimension, a symbolic meaning. More recent works are attempts to achieve a metaphorical quality and to assert more convincingly the importance of spirituality in our ego-burdened lives, as well as the ability of art to provide, through fantasy and imagination, honest insight into the self.
The artist’s personal exhibitions include Seeds of Thought, Quadro Gallery, Cluj, 2015; Smooth Misery, Brașov Art Museum, 2017; Trace. Particle. Wave, ALERT Studio, Bucharest, 2017; Transparent Thoughts in Random Order (with Alexandra Mureşan), Cluj Art Museum.
Among the more relevant group exhibitions: Metaphors are to Thought what Waves are to Sea, Romanian Creative Week, Palatul Culturii, Iași 2023; Colors, Underwater Love, Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery, Bucharest; De Facto. UAD 2023, Colonia Pictorilor, Baia-Mare, Galeria Sztuki Wspotczesnej BWA SOKOL, Poland, 2023; Superheroes/Antiheroes. Trends in Romanian contemporary art, Art Safari, Bucharest, 2021; Juventus Competition anniversary exhibition, Jecza Gallery, Timisoara, 2020; What about poor Gregor Samsa?, Anca Poterașu Gallery, Bucharest, 2015; Body Unnatural, Nunu Gallery, Taipei, 2015; Young Graduates from the School of Cluj, Mie Lefever Gallery, Ghent, Belgium, 2013.
