"Memories of a Mango" Collage

Eduard Andrei is a visual artist and art historian with a cross-cultural life experience. Born in Romania, he lived in New York for six years (2012-2018) and in Tunis for two years (2002-2004). Work Experience: 2014-2018: Programs Manager at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, NY (USA); 2013: Gallery Assistant at Emmanuel Fremin Gallery in New York, NY (USA); 2007-2012: Lecturer in European Art History, Romanian Art History, and Painting Techniques at Ovidius University of Constanta (Romania), Department of Visual Arts. Member of the Romanian Fine Artists' Association (since 1997). I consider my paintings to be on the edge between tradition and post-modernity: operating with the traditional means of painting, I often use two types of collage: in a postmodern key, the collage of citations from previous art, on the one hand, and the collage of various materials, on the other hand, but avoiding the excesses which sometimes characterize contemporary art. One of the recurrent motifs of my work is the tower, seen from various perspectives, but with the same symbolic value: the artists secluded tower in a world which seems both uninhabited and inhospitable; a vertical bridge between sky and earth with religious undertones; a magic axiom of verticality. The animals which sometimes populate the abstracted settings of the paintings, interpreted in an expressionistic key, find their source of inspiration in a domestic reality and talk to the anguishes of a defamiliarized world, in which the animalistic cry becomes the collective echo of parallel personal dramas. Some of my latest paintings depict hybrid figures - half-human, half-animal - inspired by my personal experience of a (post-)totalitarian sociopolitical context. At the same time, I am interested in the repertory of current street art, children's drawings, video games and manga, and advertising, which I visually "manipulate" in order to question what can or cannot be consumed, as well as who or what can become a commodity. My abstract works express my deepest fears and desires.