Adrian Ganea is a Romanian contemporary artist with broad interests across set design, film, animation, sculpture, and digital art. His work straddles reality and fiction, exploring the fading distinctions between the virtual and the real, the intangible and the material, as technology and automation become increasingly ever-present.
Read MoreGanea was born in Târgu Mureș, Romania. In 2011, he received a BA in Set Design from the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș, and later travelled to Germany for his MA in Set Design from Universität der Künste Berlin.
Adrian Ganea's artwork uses traditional modes such as theatre and philosophy to explore issues of the present and the future, including data, automation, simulation, and digital culture. He aims to blur the space between the immaterial and the tangible, such as through green screens and 3D simulators in his set design and performance art. He has often combined 3D simulators with performance, such as in earlier works like Cyberia (2019) and If a tree were to fall (2018), in which performer and digital avatar move as one.
Ganea's contemporary art practice therefore exists within the liminal space between the digital and the physical, often incorporating elements of both. He is also interested in sculpture, creating tangible artworks to accompany his animated films, such as a plywood cut-out that accompanies the video in Young Tree (2019), or the automated puppets which catalyse a 3D simulation in The bloodless shades shed tears (2020). The digital can even become physical in works like Cadmus figure studies (2020), for which he used 3D models originally made for animation to create sculptures made from plaster, acrylic and polyurethane resin, and plywood.
Given his interests in the future, Ganea's practice also concerns possibilities of extinction. The animation Young tree vomiting demonstration lamentation (2021), for example, imagines the afterlives of trees. Similarly, the sculpture Ghost (2021), inspires contemplation of extinction via the representation of a skeletal tree playing a guitar. Conversely, Ganea's first solo exhibition, Bird Food (2021), supports the survival of life in all its forms, particularly birds, who cohabit the environment of this public installation in the Romanian village of Siliștea Snagovului.
Ganea is very active in the visual and performing art worlds across his native Romania, and frequently exhibits or designs sets elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe. He has notably participated in every edition of the annual Media Art Festival Arad, organised by the experimental art collective Kinema Ikon, since 2018.
Adrian Ganea has participated in several residencies, including Open Access, Botanical Garden Cluj-Napoca (2020); Colaboratory, German Cultural Center Cluj-Napoca (2020); Impossible spaces, Gessnerallee, Zurich (2019); and Reciproc performativ, Fabrica de Pensule, Cluj-Napoca (2018).
Solo exhibitions Bird Food, Research Station – Tranzit.ro, Siliștea Snagovului (2021) and Ghost Trade, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2022).
Select group exhibitions include Off World Colonies, Indecis Gallery, Timișoara (2021); mafa8, Kinema Ikon – Arad Art Museum, Romania (2021); Under Pressure, Mobius Gallery, Bucharest (2021); Cyberia, House of Electronic Arts (HEK) Basel, Switzerland (2021); Tanznacht Berlin Vertigo (Part Two), Uferstudios Berlin (2021).
Ganea's website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2022
