Simona Culea

Lives and works in Bucharest, Romania

Artist statement

My paintings explore identity, memory and the people we carry within us. Faces overlap, emerge from one another and sometimes transform into landscapes, suggesting that identity is shaped by encounters, relationships and memories. My process often begins with spontaneous lines, without a predetermined image. I follow them until faces, bodies, animals or landscapes appear, then develop these discoveries through painting. In my Reunion series, multiple identities coexist within the same visual space. In 1001 Nights of Painting, this intuitive process expands into an imagined world where discovered forms generate their own narratives. I am interested in the space between intention and discovery: the moment when a line becomes a figure, one identity reveals another, and an image begins to tell a story.

Artwork