Ioana Tocoaie

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Ioana Tocoaie (b. 1998) is a Romanian painter whose work explores the interplay between the fantastic and the real, viewed through a distinctly feminist lens. Trained at The University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where she completed both her bachelor’s and master’s studies, the artist currently works in her native Sibiu. Her work unfolds as a fragmented scenography, juxtaposing recognisable motifs with metamorphosed forms to create a visual language that is at once illogical and poetic. Central to her oeuvre is the recurring presence of the female figure, often conceived as a mirror of the self. This omnipresent character, frequently placed among hybrid animals, fantastical vegetation or allegorical fragments, transforms her canvases into parallel universes where naivety and subconscious gesture hold equal power with formal construction. Tocoaie’s paintings articulate an imagined habitat in which everyday objects and details of bodily identity—hair, eyes, skin, corporeal proportions—are stripped of discriminatory hierarchies and placed on the same plane of significance. The result is an aesthetic of equality between forms, where allegory and dream states dissolve the boundaries of logic. This approach gives her work a distinctive position within the current generation of Romanian contemporary artists, bridging personal mythology with wider cultural concerns. Her artistic vision resonates with a lineage of modern utopian imaginaries while remaining firmly rooted in the immediacy of lived experience. The works present themselves as intricate puzzles of fragments, simultaneously intimate and universal, inviting collectors and viewers into a fantastical reality that challenges perception, identity, and the politics of representation.