Brăila Museum “Carol I” hosted, between April 10 and May 4, 2025, the exhibition Between Dreams and Nightmares, the first painting exhibition in the hometown of artist Gabriel Stoian. Coordinated by Alina Ruxandra Mircea, the exhibition presents a series of recent paintings.
“The exhibition marks a return “home” in a twofold sense. It is, on the one hand, a return to a spiritual matrix that was put on hold for a while, even if never actually abandoned, and on the other hand, a more determined return to the traditional medium of painting, located, until recently, on the fringes of an artistic practice primarily interested in the tools of alternative media.
Associated with New Romanticism, Gabriel Stoian’s recent production also benefits from the dialogue with pictorial traditions particularly rich in symbolic figuration: that of the Dutch “Golden Age”, that of German magical realism and, last but not least, that of Byzantine iconography. His is an erudite painting, well equipped culturally and intellectually, but whose “raw material” remains emotion. In the same way as dreams, Gabriel Stoian’s compositions encode a state of being, a memory, a feeling. Unexpected disjunctions, constellations of symbolic elements expand the meaning of a lived episode, of a certain experience, giving it a vaguely unsettling air and projecting it into an essentially metaphysical reality. Brimming with potentialities, the tension that underlies the dream-nightmare polarity is the main expressive mark of a painting capable of conveying, with equal relevance, the poetry and the anxieties of everyday life.” (Excerpt from the curatorial text)
Gabriel Stoian (b. 1985, Brăila) is a visual artist and curator. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca (2014). He has opened over 25 solo exhibitions in galleries, museums, and cultural institutions in Cluj-Napoca, Bucharest, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, Vienna, Krakow, and Belgrade. Together with his wife, Andra Stoian, he is the founder and coordinator of the New Now gallery, based in Frankfurt am Main. He lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.
Address: “Gheorghe Naum” Gallery (Traian Square no. 3, entrance via Calea Galați).
