Jecza Gallery opened the exhibition season at the Scânteia+ space with LABORATORIYA, a solo exhibition by Andreea Ilie.

“Laboratoriya marks Andreea Ilie’s first solo exhibition with Jecza Gallery. The exhibition brings together a new body of sculptural works investigating the way socialism approached the child as an ultimate project, a living material to be shaped with scientific precision.

Guided by the metaphor of the child as “soft wax,” Soviet ideology transformed childhood into a total pedagogical environment. Through extensive research and travels across the ex-Soviet space, Ilie demonstrates that this “laboratory” was, beyond its theoretical form, a concrete architectural reality, a network of physical structures in which political goals were translated into matter and space.

Her engagement with this failed utopian legacy takes the form of an archaeological and dialectical investigation. The works presented in Laboratoriya function both as replicas and as reflections: forms extracted from their original contexts and reconstructed in metal and ceramics. Through processes of essentialization and recontextualization, the formal lines and geometric rigor of the original structures are amplified, allowing viewers to experience the tension between aesthetic purity and ideological function.” (curatorial text)

The exhibition can be visited until April 4 at Casa Presei Libere, Building 2A (inner courtyard, next to the Scânteia+ space).