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.
Read MoreGanea'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 The digital can even become physical in works like Cadmus figure studies (2020), for which he used 3D models originally made for animation to create sculptures made from plaster, acrylic and polyurethane resin, and plywood.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.
