Art in Conversation
with Maria Balea
ABOUT THE ARTIST
The graphic artist and painter MARIA BALEA creates imagery structured on suggestive shapes, attentively worked out of chosen elements, motives, and associations, which are codified, metaphorical. In her plastic expression the artist, though dedicating her last years especially to the painting, to the paintbrush and the acrylic, did not give up completely her basic training, frequently turning to the means of graphic art. In the paintings created in the mixed technique the graphic, the vigorous and expressive drawing continues to hold a prevailing, definite place. The idea of structure is omnipresent in Maria Balea’s works, which distinguish themselves by a perfect unit of composition, concentrated and dense. The images projected on cardboard and canvases, coming from inside spheres, strictly submit to the laws and the algorithm of spatial order.
MARIA BALEA
Painter | Romania
Artist Statement
The plastic artist studies seek, analyze, and express herself. She turns into suggestive images her inner world. The fantasy, the under-consciousness, the soul, the mental, the imagination, the illusions, the emotions and impressions gathered, the memory, the secret world of memories, of dreams and feelings forms an endless source of inspiration for Maria Balea. Most of the compositions are conceived, elaborated and finished in the name of geometric, artistic and psychic equilibrium. The non-figurative patterns or the ones which only allusively and vaguely send us to reality, become, in Maria Balea’s vision and concept, pretexts to create clear, solid and complex structures of form and colour which belong to a personal, characteristic system of signs and ideas. She methodically avoids narrative composition and illustration. The elements she uses are relatively few, usually have a refined, clear form, and their disposal and spreading in a dynamic and concentrated space is usually done by screenings, by symmetrical juxtapositions, which strictly follow the laws of the surface. Maria Balea seeks with remarkable perseverance the essences, the major significations of the human existence in the coordinates of an image based on the identity, the variety and the expressiveness of plastic forms. The space of the order, geometrically organized, of the real world, tangible in the inner space of the artist, organically melt: their synthesis is in the same time the fruit of a rational process and of a psychic development. Maria Balea’s paintings are in fact bridges between the past and the present. The source and the evocative effect can be also identified in architecture, the construction, the representation, the relationship and the atmosphere of the compositions issued and split from the whirl of feelings. The density of the vertical forms, organized and amplified, stimulated by all the means, from all directions to a direction of accession, suggests, and expresses a strong aspiration towards heights, summits and sky. The hypostasis mostly concentrated on the vertical; embody a possible route to certitude, truth, constituting a metaphor as well of germinal, ascent, purification and cosmogony.
János Szekernyés - Art Critic
STUDIES
1988-1994 - University of Arts and Design, Graphics section, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, under the guidance of Ioachim Nica
1 999 - Member of U.A.P Romania, Arad branch
PERSONAL EXHIBITIONS
2019 ,,Painting” Artoteque Gallery of Bucharest Metropolitan Library
2018 ,,Visual Confessions” Mogosoaia Pallace, Bucharest, Romania
2017 ,,Remanent” Municipal Art Galleries Tg. Jiu, Romania
2013 ,,Arta” Gallery, Craiova Romania
2009 Art Chamber Gallery, Goa, India
2012 Helios Gallery, Timisoara, Romania
2008 ,,Fragile inner consonances”, Art Museum, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2007 ,,20x20”, Small sizes painting, Axa Art Gallery, Timisoara, Romania
2007 Helios Gallery, Timisoara, Romania
2006 Axa Art Gallery, Timisoara, Romania
2006 Biblioteque Communale Gallery, Rouffignac de Sigoules, France
2006 ,,The Chromatic Registers of Memory”, National Gallery Delta, Arad, Romania
2005 Cultural Center Gallery, Novi-Sad, Serbia
2005 Contemporary Art Gallery, Zrenjanin, Serbia
National and international Biennals, Art Festivals and over 200 collective exhibitions
Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Iordan, Finland, Slowakia, Serbia, Czech Republique, Poland, India, U.S.A, France, Macedonia, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt, Azerbaijan, China, Portugal
SYMPOSIUMS
Romania, Serbia, Austria, Germany, Jordan, Hungary, Slowakia, Finland, Poland, India, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Egipt, Spain, France, Bulgaria, China, Portugal
WORKSHOPS
2009 - Gulbarga, India
2014 - Bezdin Monastery, Romania
AWARDS
2018 - Merit Diploma for Painting at the XII International Biennial of Art in Rome, Italy
2014 - Prize of U. A. P Romania for Painting ,,Ferestre/Windows” at National Salon for Painting, Caminul Artei Gallery, Bucharest (RO)
2014 - First Prize for Painting at ,,Atelier an der Donau” Austria
2013 - IV-Th International Biennial ,, Meeting Point” Arad (RO) (mention for painting)
2009 - Prize offered by Cults and Cultural Patrimony at IX-th edition of Contest Biennial, ,,George Petrascu” Targoviste (RO)