Romanian Graphic Arts – XVth edition

From left to right: Zilahi Nono (partially visible), Ana-Maria Negru and Sebastian Rațiu (upper and lower works respectively), Rebeca Emanuella Mănescu, Ovidiu Petca, Paula Craioveanu, Mircea-Titus Romanescu, Ioan Cuciurcă and Andrei Teodorescu.

A Language Still Unfolding

By A. Ivancenco Mas 

On a November evening in Bucharest, rain, wind and cold did little to discourage the visitors arriving at the Romanian Academy’s galleries. Artists, colleagues and collectors gathered for the fifteenth edition of Grafica Românească, in the presence of the Academy’s president, Marius Andruh, and his spouse. 

Inside this superb frame of marble and light, 163 works by 103 artists offered a different measure of abundance. Drawings, prints, digital compositions and mixed media revealed the breadth of contemporary Romanian graphic art, bringing together artists working across the country and abroad. Recent graduates appeared alongside established practitioners, including artists whose working lives have continued beyond their ninetieth birthdays.

Cuciurcă’s decision to dispense with a prescribed theme gives the exhibition its particular value. Artists are invited to reveal what occupies them: the subjects they return to, the techniques they question, the images they feel compelled to make. The resulting encounter allows the public to discover a field through its differences. A national exhibition need not propose a single national voice.

Following their presentation at the Artivism Awards in Venice, Alexandra Mas’s Mystic Waters drawings arrive at the Romanian Academy Galleries in Bucharest. In these ink works, marine forms and imagined anatomies intertwine, evoking water as a place of origin, transformation and fragile coexistence. Each measuring 130 × 60 cm, they invite us to consider our belonging to the living world, and the responsibility that belonging carries.

Delicacy can become an act of resistance: the decision to attend to what is easily overlooked or harmed. Nicoleta Mitrache’s Clematis President takes shape through relief printing, its flowers and vessel emerging from the interplay of inked marks and untouched paper. In Viorel Chirea’s Three Friends, etching lends the figures a different intimacy: fine, bitten lines accumulate into faces, clothing and shared presence. Both works ask us to draw closer. Their modest scale and patient techniques give tenderness a material form, preserving a space for care where suspicion so often takes its place.

Nicoleta MITRACHE
Clematis President, 2026
Relief printing, 20 × 25 cm

Here, abstraction and figuration coexist with dreamlike imagery, surreal invention and the discipline of geometric construction. Traditional printmaking meets digital processes; the intimacy of a drawn mark finds a counterpart in images assembled, transformed or multiplied through technology. What joins these approaches is an attention to how an image comes into being, and to the possibilities of its surface. The distinction matters. In this context, graphic art encompasses practices whose ambitions extend far beyond illustration or visual communication. A line may describe something observed, establish an imagined architecture or become an event in itself. Paper can receive an image, participate in its construction or carry the evidence of repeated intervention. The means remain inseparable from the thought.

Behind this fifteenth edition lies another form of continuity: the collective labour of selection, editing and documenting. Cuciurcă’s acknowledgements make that work visible. An annual exhibition survives through artistic commitment, but also through people willing to give their time to the conditions in which art can be encountered. At Grafica Românească 2026, that persistence becomes a public invitation. The exhibition offers a view of Romanian graphic art in motion: sustained by experience, enlarged by new tools and open to questions that no single theme could contain.

Ioan Cuciurcă: The Line and Its Possibilities

For Ioan Cuciurcă, making images and creating a place for others to exhibit belong to the same commitment. Artist, graphic designer and curator of Grafica Românească, he has sustained the annual exhibition since 2011, giving successive generations a shared space without requiring them to speak a common visual language. His own practice moves between drawing, printmaking, photography and digital construction. Geometry provides an underlying discipline, yet its apparent certainty is repeatedly unsettled by the body, by fragmentation and by the ambiguities of photographic space. Art historian Ioana Vlasiu has traced this persistent geometric enquiry through his work, from the pencil drawings of Symmetrical Surfaces to the layered encounters between anatomy and colour. Structure becomes a means of testing perception: what holds an image together, and what allows it to escape its own order?

The breadth of this research was brought together in Opus-flash+ at the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum in 2018. His exhibition Afiș+, presented in Bucharest in 2013 and Ploiești in 2015, explored another essential dimension: the poster, book and catalogue as fully considered artistic forms. In Abstract 1 (2025), drawing meets digital print, continuing that exchange between the hand and the constructed image. His curatorial work extends the enquiry outwards. The exhibition becomes a place where graphic art can retain its history while discovering what it might become.

From left to right: Emil Craioveanu, Liviu Șoptelea, Trandafira Mioara Stancu, Constantin Apostol, Flavia Jurcă, Valeriu Herța, Olimpiu Bandalac, Daniela Frumușeanu, Cătălin Velcea and Daniela Pasca.