The exhibition “A Garden for Lost Thoughts” brings together a series of surrealist paintings by artist Geafar Dia, constructing a visual territory of abandoned thoughts, intimate contradictions, and fragments of memory. The works function as a space for reflection—a symbolic garden where wandering ideas, subconscious imagery, and the tensions of the contemporary world grow together.
The exhibition opening will take place on Thursday, March 26, 2026, at 18:30, at Elite Art Gallery in Bucharest.
“Geafar Dia’s painting explores the fragile zone between reality and the oneiric: incomplete characters, transformed into devices of perception and control, ruins, animals watching over absurd systems, and everyday objects turned into mechanisms that simultaneously compose logical and absurd scenes. All become metaphors for thoughts that can no longer find their place in a stable order of reality. The title of the exhibition refers to the idea of a mental garden—a space where lost thoughts do not disappear, but continue to exist in a latent form. In the artist’s paintings, these thoughts manifest as an imaginary garden, where symbols grow like plants of the subconscious and suggest a world in which the logic of dreams reveals deeper truths about anxiety, power, freedom, and identity.” – Carla Schoppel, curator
Geafar Dia constructs his scenes with clarity, using precise compositions and an austere visual language, amplifying the tension between the realism of forms and their symbolic nature. The atmosphere of the paintings recalls the surrealist tradition, yet the images remain anchored in contemporary reality, reflecting the role of the individual in an unstable social and psychological landscape. “A Garden for Lost Thoughts” proposes a visual and contemplative experience that invites the audience to traverse an inner territory populated by strange, familiar, and unsettling images: each work functions as a possible entry into an archive of forgotten thoughts. In Geafar Dia’s universe, nothing is truly lost. Thoughts continue to exist, relocated into an imaginary space where they become symbols, animals, objects, or ruins of memory—a poetic mapping of the subconscious and of the way images can preserve what the mind abandons.
Geafar Dia (b. 1989, Iraq) is a surrealist painter based in Romania. A graduate of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Painting Department, where he also completed his master’s studies, the artist develops a visual practice marked by oneiric and symbolic elements. Geafar Dia has exhibited his works in Romania, Spain, and Qatar.
The exhibition can be visited until April 24, 2026, from Monday to Friday, at Elite Art Gallery (3–5 United Nations Square), between 11:00 and 19:00.
