Laura Covaci

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Laura Covaci is a Romanian visual artist whose practice encompasses painting, digital media and hybrid image construction. Educated at the Bucharest Academy of Fine Arts, where she graduated in mural art in the early 1980s, she developed an aesthetic rooted in psychological intensity and formal precision. Her early works portrayed deserted interiors and solitary figures rendered in restrained tonalities and a calculated sense of unease, mirroring the intellectual milieu in which she grew up, surrounded by poets, actors and painters of the late-Communist generation. Covaci’s mature oeuvre presents a sustained exploration of the human condition through a gallery of figures whose vulnerability and inner tension define their physical presence. These are ambiguous beings — men and women in sterile rooms, dolls or artificial creatures combining pre- and post-human features. The corporeal distortion often visible in her figures acts as a metaphor for internal transformation rather than physical decay, translating emotional strain into visual form. Throughout her career she has maintained an active dialogue between the painterly and the digital. After a period devoted to large-scale canvases, she began incorporating collage, photography and digital manipulation, leading to her fully screen-based works produced in Paris, where she now lives and works. The series begun with Luna (2011) — a digitally modelled child figure first sketched on an iPad — marked her entry into a field where drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture converge. In these compositions, mythological and futuristic elements coexist — nymphs, mechanical animals, metallic ornaments — echoing a layered art-historical vocabulary ranging from the Flemish masters to Art Nouveau and Pop Surrealism. Covaci’s imagery operates at the intersection of emotional immediacy and technological precision. Her virtual tableaux are not mere exercises in digital craft but meditations on perception, temporality and affect. Exhibited in major venues including the Grand Palais in Paris, Galerie Serge Aboukrat and the Benetton Foundation, her work occupies a distinctive position within contemporary Romanian art as an enquiry into the post-human psyche and the aesthetic potential of the digital medium.