From August 27 to September 7, 2025, artist Marina Aristotel returns to the attention of the Bucharest public with the exhibition Book of Delights, curated by Irina Ungureanu Sturza.
“With a bachelor’s degree (2015) and a master’s degree (2017) in Painting at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Marina Aristotel stands out among the artists of her generation through her consistent use of resin, a material that has become her favorite visual imprint over time, without abandoning, however, the artistic language in which she was formed during her student years. Since 2019, the artist has extended this exploration into the area of assemblage and three-dimensional layered constructions, resulting in overlapping chromatic fields, subtle contrasts and fragmented forms, which cause the material to change its nature, becoming translucent and diaphanous, like a fragile film that filters and diffuses light.
In Book of Delights, the new series of works presented at the Calea Victoriei Gallery 91 – 93, Marina Aristotel invites her viewers to step into a space of transparencies and doubles, where the two artistic directions in which she has evolved so far look at and complement each other: works on canvas and those in resin. The exhibition is conceived as a mirror dialogue between these two visual worlds, and viewers are called to move between them like a reader leafing through the pages of an imaginary book.
This book, as the artist proposes, is not one made up of words, but of visual fragments – a volumetric expansion of the idea of an illustrated manuscript, with the title alluding to the famous medieval Persian manuscript of the Book of Delights – meant to lure the reader into an immersion that promises true delights for the eye and the intellect. In the paintings on canvas, the gaze rises in an aerial perspective, mapping intense chromatic territories, where spatial geometry and figurative reminiscences mix with flyovers of territories, countries or cities (Panama, Madrid) where the artist has traveled or only dreamed of (a great secret – Seacret or a mental space: Inside the headspace). In resin, on the contrary, the gaze seems to descend to a microscopic level, surprising delicate structures, insertions and assemblages that combine reality and imagination, in a collage that can be deciphered layer by layer.
This double movement – from top to bottom and from macro to micro – is what gives the exhibition depth. Resin, a material that has become Marina Aristotel’s hallmark, here acquires an almost immaterial fluidity and transparency, like a membrane that filters light and color. The fracturing of forms, both in the canvases and in the glossy volumes, transforms into a controlled explosion of chromatic splinters, which cut the gaze to recompose new forms and visual geometries.
In Book of Delights, matter is transfigured: painting is freed from the two-dimensional plane, and resin becomes a space of reflection and immersion. Between the two visual registers, a perpetual movement is born between the flow of time and immobility, between fragments of memory and dreamlike projections, as happens, for example, in two works thematically linked to each other and which seem to proclaim the palpable reality of a… unicorn: How I Met a Unicorn and Unicorns Do Exist. Book of Delights is an exhibition that demands time to look and patience to decipher, like a rare book that you open with a slow gesture, savoring and sniffing each page.” (curatorial text)
Irina Ungureanu Sturza
Marina Aristotel was born in 1985 in Bucharest, where she lives and works. She studied painting at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, and in her artistic practice she works with painting, resin, but also with other materials – plexiglass, collage -, and states that experimenting with various textures and techniques is what characterizes her best. Her solo exhibitions include Let’s Go Back to a Zero Point. Look Inside, Celula de Artă, Bucharest, 2022; Colour Splinters, Estopia Art Gallery, Lugano, 2020; Aasamblaj, Galeria Estopia, Bucharest, 2019. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including: Present Perfect, Arta Prezentului Art Gallery, Bucharest, 2023; Homo homini flos est, Contemporary Hair Space, Bucharest, 2022; When the Globe Is Home, Gallerie delle Prigioni, Treviso, Italy, 2020 / 2021; Abstract Mood, Estopia Art Gallery, 2021; Foreseeing the Present, Estopia Gallery, Bucharest, 2020; Death, Laborna Gallery; Diploma, Ştirbei Palace; Atelier 19&34, Visual Arts Center; Spatial Activity Studio 9, workshop led by Prof. Slawomir Brzsoska and Rafal Gorczynski, University of Poznan, UNA Gallery, 2017; An Abstract Feeling, Gallery 418, Bucharest, 2016.
The exhibition closes on September 7 with a closing ceremony, starting at 7:00 p.m. Participation is free.
