Ecaterina Vrana was born at the Romanian seaside în Constanța in 1969. Vrana graduated from the Academy of Art in Bucharest in 2014. She lived and worked in Bucharest. Her large sized paintings are traces of the artist biography, they are fragments from her life fused into an imaginary setting. The works, albeit usually large, contain a few elements placed around the centre of the canvas, while the background is monochrome. Their style oscillates between naïve and pop culture, melded together through the personal vision of the artist. 

This work is a portrait of Doru Braia made by the artist in 2008. The artist recollects in the fragments from the Dulceamar catalogue, 2019 that the character, Braia, posed to her for only 30 minutes, leaving with a sense of urgency; the artist was able to complete the portrait only after a while - initially “scraping off the entire portrait with a spoon”. 

Combining words and numbers with images recurs often in Ecaterina Vrana’s paintings. The two kinds of “signs”, the visual and the written, help each other in conveying the decrypted personal narrative of the artist. In the case of Braia, 2008, the artist added the date on which Braia has fled Communist Romania - September 28th, 1978 - the artist subtly connecting the feelings she has experienced in her creative process with the personal history of the character.