Vasile Nitelea

My work is concerned with proximity — the kind that exists between a human body and another living presence, and the visual language painting can develop to hold that relation without reducing it.
I work figuratively, within an expressionist tradition that runs from Goya and Soutine through Bacon and Freud — painters for whom the body is not an image to be described but a site of psychological and emotional intensity. Gesture, colour, and material weight are not stylistic choices in my practice; they are the primary carriers of meaning.
Two bodies of work define my practice. The first investigates the bond between humans and their companion animals — not as subject matter, but as a structural condition of the paintings themselves. The boundary between figures becomes deliberately uncertain; colour moves across anatomical limits; what the image holds is not a representation of closeness but closeness itself, made visible through paint. The second engages with collective memory and historical experience — landscapes and communities shaped by trauma, the figure as a carrier of what has been endured. In both, I am working toward the same thing: an image that remains emotionally true after its story has been forgotten.
I approach the st...

Education
2009–2013 — Alexandru Plămădeală College of Fine Arts, Chișinău, Moldova
Graphic Arts & Painting
2013–2016 — Faculty of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
BA Graphic Arts
2022–2024 — Faculty of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
MA Painting
Experience
2025 — Art Internship, New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester, UK

Selected Exhibitions
2026 — Next Art, Group Exhibition, Moldova
2024 — Art Mind, Solo Exhibition, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2024 — Art Minds, Group Exhibition, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2024 — Diploma Show, Faculty of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2012–2024 — Inter-university Exhibitions, Faculty of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2010 — Constantin Brâncuși Autumn Vernissage, Group Exhibition, Chișinău, Moldova