The painting exhibition “joyrider” signed by the artists Matei Dumitriu and Luca Florian is on display at Zina Gallery until May 18, 2024.
“The walls, each with its own color, and artists’ paintings from different periods and styles, seemingly unrelated, featuring a wide range of subjects, from plasticky trinkets, friends, clouds, a rollercoaster, to a nice thought, a hug or just confusion – got me thinking, as Lauren Berlant puts it: «we have a situation here.»” – excerpt from the exhibition text
Matei Dumitriu (b. 1995) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. He completed his studies at the National University of Arts in Bucharest (Painting department). Since 2018 he started to incorporate more multimedia layers to his projects, working with digital printing, installation and video, while maintaining a day-to-day painting routine. His last three solo shows in Bucharest – How to whisper in 2019 at Bluf, Senzații ieftine/Cheap thrills in 2020 at Atelier35 and A glimpse, approximately in 2022 at Suprainfinit Gallery – were put together as large scale multimedia installations.
His latest solo show, Painting certified, a collaborative exhibition between Suprainfinit Gallery and Galerie Neueröffnung, took place in 2023 in Köln and was the artist’s second exhibition that presented exclusively paintings.
Luca Florian (b. 1998, Bucharest) graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2022. He currently lives and works in Bucharest. He exhibited his work in solo shows at Invitro Gallery, Atelier 35 and CAV Gallery and took part in group shows at The Museum of Recent Art (Bucharest), Kunst im Tunnel Museum (Düsseldorf) and JVDW Gallery.
In his work, aspects of the visible are altered, juxtaposed and made unnatural, depicting rather their inner essence or remnant memories. The dialogue between personal cosmos, art history, literature, video games and dreams creates unheimlich representations, deconstructing and reconstructing reality. Through this visual play, often embodied in human-like figures, he tries to capture the many feelings that haunt our present world: anxiety, haste, togetherness, irritability, abrupt transitions between joy and discontent.
