Artistic Statement

Cătălin-Lucian Lungu is a contemporary artist working in mixed media, layering photography, pencil drawing, and acrylic painting into dense, fragmented compositions. His works often unfold in grids or juxtaposed panels, in which photographic fragments — a snail’s shell, a classical bust, a hand gripping a chisel — interweave with fields of gestural painting and, increasingly, with raw natural matter – worked directly into the surface, so that image, material, and abstraction interrupt and complete one another.

Lungu’s practice moves between mythology, art history, and the vegetal realm. Adam and Eve reappear across several canvases (Vegetal Rhythm with Adam and Eve, after Lucas Cranach the Elder; Rhythms with the Primordial Apple; Adam and Eve together with the Primordial Apple), their borrowed figures set adrift in thickets of painted foliage, the fruit recurring as a solitary red note against grey and ochre grounds. In other works, the artist reanimates the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea: a sculptor’s raised mallet and chisel, an antique bust, and a marble torso mid-transformation meet the elongated, orange-toned nudes of Modigliani, as if the carved and the painted figure were completing one another across centuries.

The snail’s spiral, read through the Fibonacci sequence, has grown into a motif with compositions entirely of its own: photographic close-ups of shells arranged in grid against passages of pencil and paint, a quiet counterweight to the paintings’ more turbulent, gestural passages — a symbol of patience, fragility, and slow growth, set against the violence of becoming.

Alongside these figurative and mythological threads, Lungu’s recent work opens onto still life and pure abstraction.

These compositions evoke Lungu’s childhood memories, shaped by reading art history and mythology, as well as long walks through the forest.

Lungu’s works have been exhibited in Romania (Iași and Bucharest), as well as internationally in Paris, Brussels, and London, where they have been recognized for their distinctive visual language and layered compositional depth.

Born in 1965, Cătălin-Lucian Lungu began painting in early childhood, at the age of ten. Between 1984 and 1987, he studied graphics and painting at the Popular School of Arts in Iași. At the age of twenty, he held his first solo exhibition, marking the beginning of a sustained artistic trajectory.