Solo exhibition by Ioana Iacob

The Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, a public institution of county interest operating under the authority of the Cluj County Council, invites you to visit, between October 16 and November 2, 2025, the solo exhibition of artist Ioana Iacob. The official opening will take place on Thursday, October 16, 2025, at 5 p.m.

Curator: Bogdan Iacob.

Ioana Iacob (b. 1987, Cluj-Napoca) is a visual artist whose practice explores the contradictions of contemporary existence — caught between the joy of living and the inevitable anxiety of ending. In her paintings, bodies and spaces become mirrors of life’s fragility and intensity, places where intimacy and unease coexist. Her works, traversed by a lucid sensuality, reveal the tension between beauty and dissolution, between exuberance and silence. For Iacob, painting is a process of embodying these contradictory states — a form of emotional testimony and poetic resistance.

The artist graduated from the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where she also obtained her PhD in Visual Arts (2019), and has studied in Belgium, Germany, France, and Italy. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Matca Art Space (Cluj), Laika Art Space (Bucharest), and Mie Lefever Gallery (Belgium). She has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including those at Galerie Martin Kudlek (Cologne), David Kovats Gallery (London), Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London), LARM Galleri (Copenhagen), and Plan B (Cluj/Berlin).

“Two states of the soul — simultaneously deeper, yet less sharply defined than feelings, emotions, ‘vibrations,’ and the like — are probably inevitable for every human being: joie de vivre and angoisse de mort.

Most often they come unbidden, almost impossible to summon or suppress by mere conscious will. They belong to the profound being, their realm being the trembling nephesh, not the divided psyche of psychology.

Both are fled from (yes, the paradox is only apparent), perhaps more feverishly today than ever — in the ease of instant pleasures (even ecstasies) or in the potentially deadly sterility of various forms of gnosticism, especially socio-political ones.

Both states of the soul are profoundly spiritual and constitute the absolutely necessary and foundational conditions of the religious.

One of the most revered painters of the so-called contemporary era once said in an interview that for the contemporary painter, burdened by the immense and delicious double weight of art history and stylistic freedom, the most pressing difficulty is to answer the questions ‘what to paint?’ and ‘how to paint?’.

Ioana Iacob — sometimes knowing as she paints, other times forced to understand afterward through the works that gather and overwhelm her — has been answering, consistently for over fifteen years, the first question: she always embodies in painting, beyond the deceptive diversity and false ease of surface subjects, the same profound themes — joie de vivre and angoisse de mort.

On the other hand, ridiculously gifted in her handling of color, explosively exploratory and tirelessly prolific, Ioana Iacob has not yet, fortunately, given a clear and dry answer — to the possible taxonomic satisfaction of the art system’s explanatory and commercial sectors — to the question ‘how to paint?’.

The exhibition Bloom and Doom is therefore free of pictorial platitudes, as a whole unfriendly to hashtags, and delightfully frustrating (as only rare art can be): at once clearly coherent and abrasively diverse, sensual and entropic, elegantly playful and refinedly austere.”

(Text: Bogdan Iacob)