ATELIER INTACT 2025

The Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca, November 5 – 16, 2025

Opening: Wednesday, November 5th, 2025, 6:00 pm 

Twenty-five years after its founding, the Intact Cultural Foundation reaffirms its vocation to support emerging generations of artists and to create genuine contexts for growth and visibility. In a cultural landscape often marked by institutional discontinuities, the Intact Cultural Foundation has functioned as an infrastructure of possibility, offering young creators space, time, and trust — those rare resources without which the artistic act cannot flourish. Projects such as Atelier Intact and Spațiul Intact have become landmarks of alternative artistic formation, connecting young artists to international networks, to outstanding teachers, and to professional models that have, over the years, propelled them toward major galleries and international biennials.

In Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, the place where a work comes into being is not a mere architectural construction, but a space of truth that opens itself — what he calls Lichtung, the “clearing” in which being reveals itself. The studio, in this sense, is not only a physical workspace but an ontological threshold: the place where “earth and world” confront one another, where matter retains its resistance, and where meaning gradually emerges through the act of making. “The work lets the earth be an earth. It is a setting-into-work of truth,” writes Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art.

Thus, the studio becomes a field of unconcealment (aletheia) — a threshold between the visible and the hidden, between matter and idea, between artistic solitude and openness toward the world. Within this tension, for a quarter of a century, the Intact Cultural Foundation has unfolded its activity: an institutional practice that understands creation not merely as craft, but as an event of truth, a way of making room for being through art.

The exhibition Atelier Intact, hosted by the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, arises from this double meaning of the studio — as a concrete space of learning and as a metaphysical site of revelation. Bringing together three young artists — Bianca Balaban, Dana Acatrinei, and Miruna Morțe — laureates of the Expo Maraton program at the University of Art and Design, the Intact Foundation reaffirms the continuity of a model of mentorship and reflection that binds generations through creation.

The works of the three artists articulate three major directions of contemporary visual thought. Bianca Balaban, in RAWMatter, investigates the beauty of matter in its primary, unaltered state, proposing a reflection on an ecology of creation where ethics and aesthetics regenerate one another. By cultivating biomaterials from plants, algae, or organic waste, the artist transforms matter into a living organism — fragile yet resilient — that breathes alongside the environment. Dana Acatrinei, in Between the Village and the Scroll, reconstructs an ironic-affective fresco of Romanian identity, where the sacred and the digital spectacle coexist within the same visual field. Miruna Morțe, in Telephone Without a Wire, develops a meditation on error and loss, on the impossibility of perfectly reconstructing memory in a world dominated by algorithms and degraded images.

Through these three perspectives, the exhibition Atelier Intact proposes a reflection on the studio as a site of truth and becoming — a space where the artistic act continually restores balance between memory and presence, between what is revealed and what remains hidden. At twenty-five years — a human lifetime — the Intact Cultural Foundation looks toward the future through the eyes of those who are just stepping into it, reaffirming the conviction that from one generation to the next, beyond the genetic code, culture is transmitted: the ideas, images, and gestures that give form to our shared humanity. (Marius Scafaru, the exhibition curator)