Almost thirty galleries. A grand sculpture showcase. Countless exhibition openings across the city, private collection shows, and panel discussions. And a great variety of talented artists. A trip to Bucharest in late May was definitely a not-to-be-missed opportunity to explore the Romanian private gallery scene, with the RAD Art Fair proving its position in the international art scene and the fact that it has something for everyone.
The third edition of the RAD Art Fair took place in Bucharest between May 22 and 25, 2025. This year, a total of 28 galleries exhibited at the Caro Hotel – 22 galleries in the main sector (including three galleries from outside Romania) and six galleries in the new Plaforma sector, dedicated to emerging galleries. The event was enhanced by the sculpture show with over 100 works in the hotel’s park. The publication of a report on the art market in Romania, created in collaboration with Deloitte Romania, was also an intriguing highlight.
The nature of the RAD also gives the sense that its organisers are not only focused on selling, but also – or even foremost – on community networking and building the event’s international visibility. This is indicated by the organisation of the curatorial programme, which brought dozens of curators from Europe to Bucharest. But RAD is, of course, also about artists, whose number is impossible to count and talent impossible to measure. Here’s our selection of 7 artists that were presented at the Fair, worth keeping an eye on.
Ana Avram
Ana Avram is a young artist from and based in Cluj-Napoca. Her works – installations of readymade objects or miniature models – are characterised by black humour, in which the sweet and pleasant are often juxtaposed with something macabre or repulsive. Flies writhing in foreboding convulsions (I couldn’t have saved you anyway, 2023), a bunny dying on a metal scoop (Mechanism for practicing loss [30 seconds of life and 10 of death], 2023), a washbasin soiled with brown smear (Never enough, 2023) are works that roughly illustrate the mood of Avram’s work.
At the RAD Fair, at the Lutnița Gallery booth, her works – including sculptures depicting dead birds clustered with sunflower seeds, a lamp with a shade filled with flies, a concrete towel or the gallerist’s surreal desk – were set against drawings by Mark Verlan, the iconic Moldovan artist-outsider who died in 2021. Verlan was an original individual, an artist decidedly separate and immersed in his own world. What he has in common with Avram is surreal humour and a fondness for animals, with Verlan loving cats the most, in drawings depicted in different variations – as angels, sad humanoid mascots or morphed Adidas logos.
Dimitrie Luca Gora
In his works, Dimitrie Luca Gora refers to his own childhood and experience of growing up in post-communist Romania. This year, in his solo exhibition Boundaries of Identity at the SAC Gallery, he presented, among other things, an old gas cooker transformed into a pond for a rubber duck (MacGas) and a worn wooden stool with a bowl as a setting for a Pikachu frozen in a warrior pose (BravePikachu). The preference for combining 90s pop culture heroes with communist heritage is also evident in the new work shown at the RAD – mosaics depicting Scooby-Doo as a shock worker, heroically building a national industry. Gora’s characteristic critical distance from the nationalist politics that communist Romania was imbued with during the Ceaușescu era is revealed here.
Ana Ionescu
In Ana Ionescu’s art, the material is the primary carrier of meaning. Her installations combine the order of nature and human civilisation, represented by materials such as wood, earth, hair, or steel. The inspiration of the world of magic is palpable in her works – some of them look like the remains of shamanic rituals. Others refer to the world of rationality and discipline, and the violence generated by this order, as suggested by the blades, bolts, nails, or arrows that appear in them. A work that perfectly encapsulates the artist’s strategy is her Self-Portrait (2024) – a honeycomb-like tissue enclosed in an iron frame. At the RAD, Ionesu’s work could be seen at the SAC Gallery booth and in the sculpture garden at the Caro Hotel – a miniature square pool with a metal ladder capped with bolts, positioned in a way that contradicted its function (For you I would, 2025).
Ioana Mincu
Many artists are experimenting with ceramics today, but rarely does anyone manage to achieve such impressive results as Ioana Mincu. This young artist, who just had her first solo exhibitions at Out House Gallery in London and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in Bucharest, combines watercolour painting and ceramics with great skill to create spectacular, bimorph-like objects. Mincu’s art is characterised by a fairytale-like imagination – her paintings are filled with fantastic creatures, with the world they populate resembling a narcotic vision.
Particularly eye-catching are the ceramic works, such as picture frames or standalone figurines, which are reminiscent of Rococo aesthetics in their detail and predilection for soft, floral shapes. Mincu’s favourite characters in her works are gnomes, busy with acrobatic tricks and playing with objects that come from a completely non-magical world – cables, electric sockets, or an extension cord. In the world created by the artist, technology, nature, and fantasy form a looped rhizome, disturbing but appealing at the same time.
Miruna Radovici
Miruna Radovici is an artist who seamlessly blurs the line between painting, drawing, and ceramics. She graduated in Graphics from the National University of Arts in Bucharest in 2020, in the meantime also studying at the French Institut supérieur des beaux-arts de Besançon (2019). Her work shows inspiration with David Hockney (especially when it comes to composition, colour, and drawing) and Lea Rasovsky, with whom she shared a studio for a long time.
In April 2025, her exhibition Companions to the afterlife opened at Posibila Gallery, which takes as its starting point the mementoes given to the artist by her grandmother, described by Radovici as an “archivist”. Shown in the gallery space, the objects refer to the idea of absence, but also allude to the whole range of human and non-human relationships depicted in Radovici’s work. In her paintings, we will see, among others, androgynous figures fighting against an idyllic background and post-human hybrids, framed in a sketchy, expressionistic manner. The exhibition is complemented by ceramic sculptures and drawings of animals looking at human madness from couches or cushions.
Luca Sara Rozsa
In her work, Luca Sara Rozsa focuses on the human being and explores their contemporary condition. Her paintings are distinctively evocative of the tradition of European painting – the human silhouettes filling the picture fields are reminiscent of those in paintings by Gaugin, Cézanne, or the late Picasso. The artist places her characters against an idealised landscape, in a place beyond time and reality. Attention is drawn to the twisted silhouettes of these figures, looking as if they have been stripped of their bones and spines, and sometimes morphing into hybrids, almost resembling AI creations.
Rozsa’s style has evolved considerably over the last few years, with the artist moving away from painting of a gesture to more thoughtful and refined compositions, although still impressing with her painterly freedom. Despite their seemingly idyllic mood, Rozsa’s paintings still radiate a restless energy – in them, man does not seem to dominate nature, but to be lost in it, to lose their civilised form. The artist admits to a fascination with Albert Camus’ existentialism, and her doubts about the meaning of life were heightened by the catastrophic mood during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her paintings express a desire to define a new meaning of human existence and the defeatism that accompanies these aspirations.
Daniel Van Straalen
Daniel Van Straalen lives and works in The Hague, but his imagination is immersed deep in the internet. His practice can be likened to a DJ who, with unrestrained imagination, mixes musical genres and samples fragments of cult songs to create a surprising and humorous collage. Van Staalen, however, does not mix sounds but images, doing so with the freedom characteristic of copy-paste culture.
During the RAD, his solo exhibition No problem, here’s hyperfocus in the echochamber was on display at Pharmakon Gallery. It featured, among other things, a neon sign depicting St George fighting a dragon, meme paintings and a light-box with a self-portrait of the artist, reminiscent of a post-internet altarpiece. The afterimages of classical culture that appear in his works, reworked into ironic messages, become an expression of the contemporary sensibility of a global, online community.
Written by Karolina Plinta
