The group exhibition “Peelings” at SCÂNTEIA+ marks the official opening of the 2026 exhibition season.
The exhibition, curated by Roxana Morar, brings together four active voices from the Romanian contemporary art scene and reflects on how objects, materials, and environments adapt, react, and reveal new layers when shaped by external forces.
From rigid steel sculptures to immaterial video works, the exhibition creates a setting in which layers are gradually removed, exposing what is usually hidden beneath: traces of time, change, and memory.
“What happens if we gently scratch the surface? When we reveal step by step, what is underneath? Can we perceive this as an act of renewal and care?
Peeling anything, piece by piece, puts us inevitably in a moment of reflection, on careful ground. Exfoliating coverings, shells, and outer layers forces out new shapes and meanings. In this sense, peeling becomes as much an act of care as exposure. By exposing what lies beneath, the gesture distances us from familiar forms, allowing meaning to shift as we move.
“Peelings” brings together the work of four artists within a shared conceptual framework. Across their projects, each artist explores layers of meaning that hold latent, personal landscapes beneath the surface.
While the artists share a common structural and experiential framework within the gallery space, each practice unfolds a distinct inner world, shaped by fragility, subtle gestures of irony, poetic sensibility, and memories. Spending time with the works and their materiality becomes essential, as new meanings emerge precisely through prolonged attention to objects and surfaces.
Peeling, understood as a careful and deliberate act, arises within a culture shaped by acceleration, where speed often displaces attention and meanings are consumed before they are fully grasped. In this type of social setting, dominated by immediacy and constant stimulation, the exhibition proposes a deliberate shift. From instinctive, superficial encounters toward a conscious decision to remain connected with the space. We tend to accept the aesthetic outer layer of things without pausing to ask what lies within. In this show, we invite the public to pause and reflect. To pierce materiality and embrace each artist’s viewpoint on the surrounding world.
Alexandra Mocan works in her practice with playfully reconfigured objects, elements that simultaneously reflect the ideas of exhaustion, resilience, and the fragile mechanics that lie within the motivation extracted from everyday life. Her use of “objects-appropriation” and “near-clichés” does not aim at nostalgia, but at exposing how ordinary objects silently absorb collective anxieties and unspoken expectations.
In the work of Ana Ionescu, her metal sculptures resemble objects that appear recognisable yet slightly detached from their original function. Her works expose our need to place ourselves at the centre of meaning-making, transforming egocentric perception into a productive space of multiple interpretations.
For Ana Petrovici, her rigid structures operate as containers for emotional pressure and sensory intensity, allowing fragility to emerge from within the displayed industrial skin. Underneath the metal layer, we can find vulnerable, poetic, and deeply embodied inner terrain, where desire, anxiety, and memory become materially embodied.
Thea Lazăr’s video piece puts us inevitably in a reading process shaped by duality. Through the act of flower pressing, the installation explores how local and everyday knowledge about nature is produced, owned, and remembered, while simultaneously uncovering the complex Eurocentric and institutional frameworks embedded in this seemingly innocent gesture.” (curatorial text)
The exhibition can be visited at SCÂNTEIA+ (Casa Presei Libere, Bucharest) until March 12, from Thursday to Saturday between 2:00 PM and 6:00 PM. Admission is free.
