Bringing together six artists working across mediums, from sculpture and installation to photography or scent design, the group exhibition Every Living Being is a Chimera unfolds as an exploration of unusual scenarios and transformations as common ground, vehicle, and underlying desire in the artists’ endeavors.Referencing one of the chapters in Emanuele Coccia’s book Metamorphoses through its eponymous title, the show proposes a dialogue between depicted characters, experiences, states, and moods of a shifting quality.Shape-shifting, of bodies as well as matter, allows the boundaries between beings and realms, matter and non-matter, human and non-human, to fade away. As Coccia also writes, our life begins long before we are born. Species are a mosaic made up of many parts and techniques “borrowed” from other species, a continuous metamorphoses of life.If in mythology, literature, or folklore, chimeras were fire-breathing hybrid creatures, for the artists in this exhibition, they are metaphors, experiments, or companions destined to pose questions, evoke desire, or criticize social norms. At a careful look, they are also deep inquiries tapping into our subconscious, entering a world of dream and illusion, with surreal undertones that challenge our perception.In the exhibition, besides being a symbol of interconnectedness, the chimera is seen as a metaphor for a new beginning, a step into a new direction, taken after a careful consideration of the challenge ahead.
Cristina Bută
Raluca Băraru (b. 1981) is a visual artist with a background in art direction and illustration. She is one of the Romanian artists engaging with a very serious type of non-serious art. Her surreal, outlandish, and piercing imagery—of which paintings and watercolors are present in the exhibition—reveal a strong presence.
Realism blends with local poetry in her works, which contain allusions to religion, women’s rights, animal rights, and communist stories. A deeply personal canvas stretches from Raluca’s subconscious and her thin brushes to our imagination, exploring emotions such as fear, pleasure, vanity, disgust, attraction, empathy, irony, the bizarre, and the uncanny.In dreamlike phantasms and Miyazaki-like characters or post-apocalyptic scenarios, an important figure that can be found recurringly in her work is the chimera. Chimeras draw on local myths, portraying hybrid bodies or fragments of bodies and objects that create dramatic, complex, and equally alluring associations.
Mihaela Coandă (b. 1999) is a young painter working with oil colors and watercolor, using surfaces such as wood panel, linen, and jute canvas. A translation of her personal dreamscapes, her works blend memories, fantasies, and ambiguous emotions into captivating visuals.The open windows in her compositions symbolize a passage between the known and the unknown, offering a space for exploration and discovery. Hybrid beings inhabit her art, blurring the lines between real and fantastical, traditional and unconventional.
Working mainly from the banal still life arranged by her, she adds bizarre objects or beings from her imagination, keeping a form without overwhelming detail. Her works exude a sense of solitude, and yet, in their unnaturally warm tones, seem equally inviting. Her Organic watercolor series is inspired by Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, documenting a fictional world through active imagination.
Within a post-humanist framework, Anastasia Dumitrescu uses interdisciplinary intersections between photography, video art, sound design, and installations. Her practice is shaped by a search through latent streams, invisible narratives, and meanings that shape our behaviors and perceptions of the world.
Her recent projects Bardo and Katabasis refer to states of transformation and ancestral mythical legacies. A space without a map, the gap between realms where a thrilling disorientation invades the senses, becomes a source for an alternative variety of knowledge, a catalyst to the imagination.
A concept such as bardo can be used to describe unusual times. Through her works, Anastasia Dumitrescu acknowledges that time is profoundly out of joint, due to immense changes at a planetary scale, and so is place. It feels like we are on shifting ground. Although frightening, such a space or gap between known worlds is also a place of potential transformation.
Ana Preduș creates scent art. The distinctive signature of her olfactory art is a complex, balsamic, strong, and intense character, perhaps given by her first olfactory memories, related to perfume bottles of Opium, Poison, No. 5, and their mixture with warm skin and tobacco, deeply engrained in her memory.
Having a preference for dense compositions, even when she tries to create something more delicate, ethereal, she is inevitably led to the ingredients that appeal to her more: patchouli, incense, leather, resins, wood, smoke, musk, and animal molecules. Together, these fragrances constitute an authentic expression of her olfactory identity.
Alexandru Ranga works constantly to seek a new vision. His practice focuses on the social aspects of human life, using therianthropic elements to highlight various social typologies. His artistic universe is populated by different animals that take on metaphorical qualities.Working in deep connection with the material he employs—metal—cast, welded, shaped in numerous ways, he gives birth to bees, rats, birds, and hybrid creatures worthy of admiration.The figurative elements in Ranga’s carefully finished works give way to stories that, stemming
Drawing on ideas of continuous transformations of materials and realities, Cristian Răduță’s installations pendulate between post-human dystopianism and contemporary social critique. Just like in a theatre play, it seems that the artist casts protagonists to inhabit newly imagined scenarios.
The roles are “played” by animal companions who often mirror back to us strange paradoxes related to human-non-human relationships, absurd-surrealist associations, twists on history, and culture as we so well know them.
The animals become the vessels carrying questions of power and fragility, domination, and control. Their biped position, the use of found or cheap materials, strong pigments, and carefree assemblage point toward taming and forced transformation.
Răduță’s endeavor is an open-ended one, posing questions and exploring possibilities. In his artistic process, one can notice how, through association with an object, a sculpture merges into another, and yet another one, making room for infinite possibilities to which an end cannot necessarily be grasped.
Cristina Bută is a contemporary art curator and writer based in Bucharest. She has a background in literature and cultural analysis, as well as curating. She has been a curator in training at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where she worked on the solo shows of Maria Lassnig and Walid Raad (AICA Prize 2020). She was a co-curator of the 5th edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara (2023), My Rhino Is Not A Myth, art science fictions, and the curator of many solo and group exhibitions. Currently, she is working on projects in collaboration with artists, galleries, and cultural institutions, and is part of the newly formed curatorial collective Many-body.
Holding space for you to wander
Contemporary Multisensorial Art Gallery
