Mihaela Mihalache: Interior Construction and Deconstruction

Accompanying program on Saturday, 29 June 2019, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. – animation workshop for children, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. – commented viewing of the exhibition and the exhibition activity of Klamovka Pavilion.

Mihaela Mihalache graduated from the University of Art and Design in Cluj Napoca, Romania. Her artwork reflects her research of a space and the movement of man within the space, while searching for self-knowledge by means of paintings. In the Altán Klamovka Gallery, she presented a series of paintings – her PhD project – that focuses on architecture that affects and forms us. She analyzed a limited space on several levels – in terms of time and location. Her interface points for grasping reality are physical, idealistic and psychological boundaries that she sets for a living space from the perspective of both an intimate space and a public space.

Mihaela Mihalache’s artwork is based on the design of an empty room – a studio, an apartment. She then builds up the room through the process of painting and examines it by adding different layers. By laying out items and furnishings, she creates an interior where every additional element pushes the boundaries of its perception. The artist captures the perspective incongruity, ambiguous patters and visual riddles, for which she uses dark, often even monochromatic, colors. The figures in her paintings refer to a daily lived-in space. Her interiors not only present different life situations but are also metaphors of the inner and outer world of an artist who in his artwork fluctuates between agony and ecstasy, between success expectation and disappointment, between life and death. Her exhibition Interior Construction and Deconstruction thus focused on an artist’s life that is circumscribed by an artist’s creative space where we can feel emptiness as well as fullness and where the human figure suggests a certain existential testimony of an artist. In the Altán Klamovka Gallery, Mihaela Mihalache used small painting formats to create a site-specific painting installation that reflected the limited space of the gallery.

Lenka Sýkorová