Florica Prevenda

Early life and education

Prevenda was born in an Aromanian family, who suffered persecution of the communist regime. She studied at Iaşi University of Arts (1980–1984), where she received her B.F.A. in Painting.

Artistic Style

Florica Prevenda is one of the most innovative artists within Romanian contemporary art space. An introspective spirit, the artist develops an intense studio art work drawing attention particularly through a rich experience of conceptual and artistic challenge and self-discovery. Her artistic and intellectual investigations at the intersection of existing and emerging themes to interpret and critique the world of images are being explored through a series of experimental innovative mixed-media projects in her exhibitions.

From the fundamental theme of the Face (The National Art Museum, 1999) until the anonymous multitude of the silhouettes of the Metropolis (The Shadows of the Present, Simeza, 2004), the painter meditates (approaching the face schematically and in series) on the entire magma of emotions and anxieties that haunt the human condition nowadays, evolving towards the depersonalisation of all the nets and towards the consumist reification. This existentialist pithy message is embodied in Florica’s painting exactly in the rind, the leather, the scales, the scars, the imprints and the crust of the tones of white, grey, black and ochre of the wrapping cardboard. Her images do not become simpler from a cycle to another. They become poli-matters reliefs, with cassetons, with the zigzag rhythms of the goffered cardboard, with fields of numbers with schematized eyes and palms, with interweavings and garlands of paper bands or painted cloth. Therefore, the artist neither performs in narrative scripts, nor composes after effects of rhetoric of the proper abstract image.

Prevenda composes, or more precisely she lays down visual-tactile matter, like the ashes of her feelings, over simple urban signs of human presence. The processes of growing of the images and of the matters they wear, the densification of the surfaces - symbolically speaking - build for the artist a niche of introspection. It’s a painting of emotional combustion, serious in inventiveness, without falling into the ludic. The technique of the artist produces an extremely rich pictural texture without intentionally recovering the ridiculous. Prevenda manufactures bricolating matters and materials without exalting the poverist non-finite. As the musical form close to her painting seems to be an ample organ tocatta.

Prevenda’s great picto-objectural suites assert, invoking paradoxically exactly the shadow of the human, the withdrawal of the artist from the mundane and the passionate abnegation in the material elaboration of the pictorial body and of its stratified density.

She is working on a series of man-paintings on the theme "Facebook" and "Net People", inspired by the rapid communication via the Internet. "In that series I would be more open to what comes from outside, to social issues and stuff".

Exhibitions

Her works have been presented at different locations in Romania and abroad: Romanian Cultural Institute, Vienna (2016), Annart Gallery, Bucharest (2016), Arielle d'Hauterives Gallery, Brussels (2016), National Museum of Art, Chisinau (2016), Timisoara Art Museum (2014), Brukenthal National Museum (2013), AnnArt Gallery (2014), Arthus Gallery, Brussels (1999, 2001, 2004; 2011); National Museum of Art / Contemporary Art, Bucharest (1999); Galerie Het Dijkstoelhuis, Wageningen, Holland (2002, 2004); Mogosoaia Museum, Romania (2008); Galerie Lamber, Valkenswaard, Holland (2000); FNV Kiem, Amsterdam (2002); M.I.A. “One Woman Show”, Milano, Italy (2007); Galeria Simeza, Bucharest (2004).