The CREART Gallery in Bucharest presented the solo exhibition entitled “Extended Time” by visual artist Daniela Zbarcea, curated by Adriana Oprea.
“The dreams noted by artist Daniela Zbarcea in a diary filled in over the last few years are the subject of a psychobiographical essay in several sequences, and among these, their graphic fixation on the pages of a fragmented workbook or on the “blank page” of her own bedsheet constitutes only one episode. In turn, a zero degree of figuration and drawing, writing as a bodily act performs in the artist’s project a personal pictographic language, combining letters, images, signs and shapes – often unintelligible in the absence of mediation through rereading and translation offered by the author.
Sleep and dreams can be a subversive critique and an affront to the “diurnal” order of reality that we consciously share with others. Art history has cultivated them for these virtues, and Daniela Zbarcea has just completed extensive academic research on the autobiographies and diaries of artists throughout time, in which the narration of dreams is frequently a form of self-portraiture. Containing examples of one’s own dreams, that is, samples of a psychic manifestation free from the current constraints of the conscious world (and therefore problematic, even possibly scandalous and rebellious from the perspective of “waking” reality), Daniela Zbarcea’s personal dream archive paints a dreamscape with texts and drawings, which serve systematic introspections and voluntary self-observations, pursued with obstinacy and perseverance. In the process of her creation, the artist successively plays the roles of author/producer of dreams, voyeur and observer of her own sleep, and then secretary and storyteller of them by capturing, fixing and processing them into visual narratives.
The props of the process (the bed, the room, the artist’s intimate area, her work space and objects, the studio, the house) disappear tactfully and discreetly into an ambient background that accommodates strange dream stories. And the same scenography of the mental world experienced as a Wunderkammer also expands the temporal frame of reference (sleep and dreams as time givers), to include a controversial, liminal experience, which the artist embraces and even claims to practice with a similar discipline and dedication: lucid dreaming.” – Adriana Oprea
Daniela Zbarcea is a PhD in Visual Arts since 2022. Visual artist, curator and cultural project manager, she has a double training in visual arts and painting restoration. Daniela Zbarcea has a long experience working with the Romanian artistic environment, in which she has worked for almost 15 years not only as a visual artist, but also as an art manager and expert evaluator for numerous Romanian contemporary art projects and exhibitions. If at the beginning of her career the artist focused on the study of painting and photography, in recent years she has expanded her area of interest through multidisciplinary activities, oriented towards performative, post-media practices, closely combined with a sustained approach of artistic research and documentation.
Author of several essays and articles on Romanian contemporary art, Adriana Oprea has been collaborating with Romanian and international artists, publications and art institutions for over 20 years. Trained in art history, Adriana is a curator and art critic, a contributor to the magazine Arta since the new series in 2010, and a museographer at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest since 2006. At MNAC, she coordinated the production of several solo and group exhibitions organized between 2014 and 2017, and is currently in charge of the museum’s documentary archive dedicated to contemporary art. A member of the International Association of Art Critics since 2013, she curates mainly projects by contemporary artists.
Organized by the City Hall of the Capital, through CREART – the Center for Creation, Art and Tradition of the Municipality of Bucharest, the exhibition presented recent works by the artist and was open to the public between July 16 and August 31, 2025, at the CREART Gallery.
