Since 2023, the Artep Gallery Association has organized the Art Gen program, through which visual arts graduates from Iași are supported in launching their graduation projects as exhibitions in an art gallery. The projects are selected through a public competition, with applications evaluated by a jury composed of specialists.
For the edition launched in the summer of 2025, nearly 20 students applied. Their projects were evaluated by a jury consisting of: Eliza Yokina (architect), Matei Martin (journalist and cultural mediator), Suzana Dan (artist and cultural manager), Iulia Toma (artist), and Mihaela Irimescu (gallerist). The winning artists are Leo Bîrcu and Cezara Pâțâligă, graduates of the Photo-Video specialization at the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iași.
From February 19 to March 31, 2026, Artep Gallery simultaneously hosts the two artistic projects: Paleolithic Earth, by Leo Bîrcu, and The Lady’s Bread, by Cezara Pâțâligă. Two exhibitions in which traces of a fabricated time become visible—whether in the form of streaks of concrete stretching across the city, or in the deceptive footsteps of the simulacrum in which we live, imprinted in matter, on the body, and in dough.
“The title of the project invokes the original moment of the Paleolithic as an initial point in the shaping of the landscape, while also introducing an ironic note toward the glorification of the past as an instrument of identity, to the detriment of a critical understanding of the present,” explains curator Cristiana Ursache about Leo Bîrcu’s project.
“Paleolithic Earth borrows principles and ideas from the exact sciences, but strictly as metaphors and tools for reflection. The project does not attempt to reconstruct a distant history, but rather to propose a form of attentiveness to the complexity of the present and to what this territory can still reveal,” Leo Bîrcu adds.
Leo Bîrcu (b. 1990, Drobeta-Turnu Severin) is a visual artist and graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design (UNAGE), based in Iași. His work is rooted in photography and fits within the field of contemporary documentary practices.
“We live within a simulacrum, where the image (hyperreality) becomes more important than reality itself. In this sense, the project The Lady’s Bread reflects a poetic revolt against this simulacrum: fragments of the body and the textures of dough become ‘autonomous actants’ that claim their own agency,” curator Cristiana Ursache explains about Cezara Pâțâligă’s approach.
“The Lady’s Bread represented a healing process for me. We live in a world where unrealistic beauty standards place enormous pressure on us, so I felt the need to create this space for accepting identity—both for myself as an artist and for the viewers,” says Cezara Pâțâligă.
Cezara Pâțâligă (b. 2000, Iași) is a visual artist and a master’s student in Photography and Video Art at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iași. Her artistic practice explores human emotions and experiences through the five senses.
