What does it mean to grow yourself by growing someone else?
What does it mean to become? To bud? To blossom?

From June 1 to 15, 2025, Gallery Studio 76 in Bucharest presents the exhibition “R(a)ise th’eM” by artist Maia Ștefana Oprea, an intimate and living installation, on the border between visual art and maternal biography. Painting, graphics, object and performance grouped around the theme of the garden, a living garden not only of plants and the body, but also of ideas, emotions and becoming.

The title, a play on words with multiple meanings, invites a subtle reflection: “raise them”, referring to children, a natural growth similar to plants, and “rise Me”, a form of self-elevation through care, creation and deep connection with others. The exhibition, curated by Mihaela Cristea, symbolically opens on International Children’s Day, marking a celebration of life in all its forms: from the fragility of a blade of grass to the inner elevation of a mother.

“I am interested in the interpenetration of contemporary approaches with those on the edge of craftsmanship, within the dynamic interaction between graphics, painting, photography, writing, in the diversity of explorations whose convergence is progressively drawn, like an organism in continuous evolution. In the creative process I approach abstraction, the dissolution of time, consumerism, nomadism and exile in nature. Painting has become for me nostalgia in the face of the objectual precariousness of the past”. – Maia Stefana Oprea

The highlight of the exhibition is the live performance, an almost ritualistic moment that takes place on the day of the opening, June 1, from 3:30 p.m. “The artist will paint on a large canvas alongside her daughters, who will work in parallel on a second canvas. These presences, adult and child, mother and daughter, artist and co-creator, transform the artistic act into a dance of relationship and becoming together. The garden here acquires a deeply human dimension, in which the gesture of raising someone becomes, in a mysterious way, a way of elevating one’s own person.
In the form of a garden-experience, the exhibition “R(a)ise th’eM” proposes to the public a visual journey on themes of growth and becoming in a natural environment, of the garden that nourishes the family core, but also on themes such as the relationship between motherhood, nature and creation.” (excerpt from the curatorial text)