Hello everyone, I hope you enjoyed my first post and became interested in all kinds of new art, especially the Eastern European one!

My second upload includes information about the estate our family owns in South-Western Romania, in the village of Cetate, which has been turned into a gallery and where artist in residency programmes are taking place each summer since 2008; they are workshops for Romanian and international artists.

The workshops provide an excellent opportunity to reach out and to create bonds with young artists from Romania and across Europe: Constantin Luser, Stefan Papco, Ignazio Mortellaro, Maggie Michael, Simon Iurino and Vikenti Komitski to name a few.

My mother is building a sculpture garden which is spread all over the estate. The artists are encouraged to make in- and outdoor pieces which will stay there permanently.

In this blog I will mainly focus on the artist of the exhibition we are currently showing, curated by Austrian curator Victoria Dejaco, which opened at the beginning of June. It is a solo show by Stefan Radu Cretu who was born in Sibiu in 1983. His academic background is as follows:

He studied at the Art and Design University in Cluj and graduated from the Ceramic-Glass-Metal department in 2006. He received an Erasmus grant for one year at the Fine Art Academy, Wroclaw in Poland in 2005. In 2008 he achieved his master’s degree in sculpture at the National University of Arts in Bucharest. Finally, he got his PhD in Visual Arts at the National University of Arts in Bucharest in 2016.

Stefan is a kinetic artist working mainly with technology. The majority of his works are mobile, and he creates them in many different shapes and forms. Some are sculptures for outdoors, some are moving paintings while others are small sculptures for indoors. His sketches for the artworks are very interesting as well, as they show his thought process and the different ways, he thinks of designing them.

His works emphasize the fusion between nature and technology that seems to be more and more the final goal of humankind. Technology is considered by him, one force that has in present times the greatest impact over people’s lives. His works are also critical of the way mankind is treating the environment which can be seen in some of his works.

His pieces include all 4 elements: the ocean, the sky, the earth, as well as the light. His sculptures are everything from funny, humorous and mean to even politically critical or poetic. Through his having worked a lot with ceramics at the beginnings of his education, Stefan was able to develop the ability to dominate many other materials and imbue the works with emotional and psychological meaning, creating a vast range of expressions.

The current solo exhibition at Cetate is showing many of Stefan’s works from 2014 until now. This is his third exhibition with our gallery, and it’s taking place in the former grainery of Cetate which has a space of 850sqm. Therefore, Stefan was able to show all his sculptures, big and small as well as some of his drawings and sketches. He has been part of the artist in residency programme since 2010 and hence has many works in the Cetate Arts Danube Sculpture Park. These works also completed his retrospective from over the years.

Stefan Cretu also had several solo and group exhibitions in the past. The majority of them were in Romania but he has also shown his works in other countries. His first solo show was in 2006 in Bucharest and his first group show was in 2009 in Sangeorz Bai. He has also had group shows at the Museum Beelden an Zee in Scheveningen, Netherlands in 2014; Essen, Germany at the Contemporary art Ruhr in 2015, and at the MNAC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest in 2018.

His first solo show outside of Romania was in Schmalkaden, Germany at the Stadt und Kreisbibliothek Heinrich Heine in 2009, he also had a solo exhibition with our gallery in 2014 in Bucharest.

Stefan is part of different collections, which include Beelden aan Zee Museum in Scheveningen, Netherlands, as well as Boynton Beach Art in Public Places, Florida, USA and a few private collections in the USA, Canada and Germany.

Stefan Radu Cretu is a very imaginative and ambitious artist who creates a new work almost every day. His works are popular with the public as they are one of a kind and therefore more eye-catching than the usual sculptures or paintings. Children really love his works, as the big sculptures also look like giant toys which sometimes make noise as well.

He definitely deserves to be known on an international scale as he is very talented and his approach unique.

I will be adding his Instagram where he is very active, so you can follow his progress. https://www.instagram.com/stefanraducretu/?hl=de