contemporary visual art
ABOUT
Adrian Dică’s artistic practice spans painting, installation, and performance, characterized by the use of diverse materials and techniques such as oil, acrylic, water-based stains, industrial paint, and pigments. His themes often explore the juxtaposition of contrasting elements, such as the color pink with industrial ruins, to reflect on the complexities and paradoxes of life.
He has exhibited widely, both in solo and group exhibitions, across Romania, UK and Europe. Notable exhibitions include the Summer Exhibition 2024 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the London Art Biennale 2023, and several retrospectives at prestigious venues like the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest and Mogosoaia Palace including 2 duo exhibition with Laura Niculescu.
Adrian Dică is a contemporary Romanian artist born in 1984 in Alexandria, Romania. He currently resides and works in his private studio in Bucharest. Dică studied at the National University of Arts in Bucharest (UNARTE), where he earned both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Fine Arts under the guidance of Professor Marcel Bunea. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the UNARTE Excellence Diploma for his BA artworks and the 1st Prize at the Painting Biennale Chisinau in 2021.
Dică’s work is part of several significant collections, including the BRD GS Art Collection, the National Museum of Art in Moldova, and the Jecza Museum in Timișoara.
2022 Intermezzo, Mogosoaia Palace
2021 A Square Apart, Palace of the Parliament, Bucharest
2019 Undeniable Illusion of Pink, Arthalle Gallery, Bucharest
2017 Ha-ha! La-la! Palace of the Parliament, Bucharest
2014 The Great Garbage, House Night, Bucharest
1st Prize at Painting Biennale Chisinau (2021)
Painting Prize at the Balassi Hungarian Cultural Institute, Bucharest (2018)
Prize for Painting by the National Union of Artists (2017)
2nd Prize Arts In Bucharest (2016)
Theodor Moraru Award Finalist (2016)
Excellence Prize for Painting from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Moldova (2015)
3rd Prize Prize at Juventus Contemporary Awards by Triade Foundation, Timisoara (2014)
Special Prize at Juventus Contemporary Awards by Triade Foundation, Timisoara (2014)
Excellence Diploma for his BA (2013)
Sometimes we reject pink as it seems the color of girls, of women or men of certain ages, of funny stupid dolls, of posh ladies, kid diapers, little girls’ clothes. It’s a disgrace, a joke, a cliche, a laugh. But, yet, the prettiness of pink reveals, by contrast, a harsh and adult acknowledgment of the serious side of our lives. That’s why Adrian Dica uses pink and garbage in his paintings, although at first sight, the association seems meaningless.
As long as we deepen into his works we discover it’s not about the simplest series of pinky brushstrokes thrown upon an image of a pile of dirt or that of a preapocaliptical scenery, it’s the reflection of our lives. We all have good and bad, happiness and sadness, sunny summers and icy winters, a unity of opposites and paradoxes that makes our lives meaningful. Adrian Dica succeeds in making out of his art an image of life in itself and meeting points with the others’ conscience.
In apparent opposition with pink, the industrial ruins of a previous era are personal interior landscapes, conditioned by the time and the space of childhood significant memories. The physical structures he paints are abstract mental schemes that belong to the timelessness of a space-based on perception. The artistic speech is intimate and imaginative, revealing the existence of conscience: the attitude of detachment and revaluation of memories.
From a technical point of view the artist aimed at certain correctness validated by their own experience and by the methods already established. Starting from the techniques specific to the pictorial language (oil, acrylic on canvas) he tried to experiment based on a final expressiveness. Without developing a strict, repetitive method he integrated into the technique used various variables ranging from acrylic colors and oils to using water based stains, textural sprays, industrial paint, and pigments. The brush is generally used for counterpoint, the rest of the image is constructed using a palette knife, chassis wedges, scrapers, paint sprayers.
Diana Andrei