The exhibition Drapery Descending a Staircase by Adelina Ivan, curated by Adriana Oprea and Cerasela Barbone, is presented at Muzeul de Sculptură Ion Jalea from April 22 to May 31, 2026. The project investigates the boundaries between painting and sculpture, foregrounding a practice that explores textile materiality and its potential to generate hybrid forms situated between media. Through works that combine geometry with the fluidity of soft materials, the artist constructs a visual discourse on fragility, memory, and temporality, engaging in a subtle dialogue with the classical museum space.
“Understanding the practice related to the dissolution of the boundaries between painting and sculpture and the search for a space located between these two media is the stake of this in situ intervention within a classic art museum. This encompasses the tension between the inherent qualities of geometry and the fluid nature of textiles. The working process and the materials used, especially soft materials, such as textile, aluminum, and a series of less visible materials, lead to specific artworks carrying an imprint of impermanence and fragility. They include abstract, geometric, layered forms, made up of modules of different sizes resulting from sectioned textile bales, fluid forms located on the border between painting and sculpture, layers of painted materials combined with a series of other materialities that contain multiple time levels and references to art history.
Symbols of identity and resistance, these totems, pigment sculptures, are actually paintings on canvas, mini-bales formed by layers of painted textile material stacked one on top of the other in a state of instability and fragility. Through reduction and stratification, folding and repetition, textile fragments – omnipresent objects in the intimate proximity of bodies and domestic spaces – function as carriers of personal and collective narratives. Time flows in folds, as a subjective, fluid and profound experience, in which the past, present and future merge.” – Adelina Ivan
Adelina Ivan (1971) works and lives in Bucharest. She holds a BA and MA in Art & Design within the National University of Arts Bucharest and a PhD in Visual Arts at the same University. Her approach to textile installations and painting uses themes that question the fundamental framework of painting and the spatial parameters of sculpture. Her practice is based on research and experimentation and on a series of observations associated with the ability of textile to absorb, adapt and transform the painted surface as an adherent medium.
She has exhibited, among others at: Kunsthalle Seinäjoki, Finland (2025), Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (2024), EWERK Luckenwalde Berlin (2022), Contextile Biennial, Portugal (2022), MNAC Bucharest (2022), ICR Venice (2022), MARe Museum of Recent Art Bucharest (2021), Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature Paris (2019), Spinnerei Leipzig (2019), Kunsthalle Bega (2019), Media Art Festival Arad (2018), Artissima Torino (2018), tranzit .ro / Bucharest (2017).
