Victoria Zidaru

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Victoria Zidaru is a Romanian visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, painting, installation, and textile-based media. Trained at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest under Professor Paul Vasilescu, she has developed a distinctive artistic language within the post-1980s Romanian art scene, characterised by an interplay between spiritual reflection and material experimentation. Her early work demonstrates a sustained engagement with archetypal imagery and the mediation of the sacred through contemporary artistic forms, while her later projects articulate a nuanced synthesis between ritual gesture and sensorial perception. Her exhibition, The Body, Temple of the Holy Spirit (Căminul Artei Gallery, 1991), introduced a symbolic vocabulary in which matter—bronze, textiles, and vegetal fibres—becomes a vehicle of transformation. Subsequent solo shows, including Zestrea (1997) and Cod 50 (2005), deepened this approach by reinterpreting traditional domestic crafts within an installation-oriented visual idiom. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, she collaborated with the sculptor Marian Zidaru on a series of projects exploring theological and metaphysical themes, exhibited in such venues as the National Museum of Art of Romania, the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, and the Ateneo Veneto in Venice. Since 2016, Zidaru’s individual practice has evolved towards immersive, multi-sensory environments that incorporate olfactory and tactile dimensions, establishing what critics have described as a form of “olfactory sculpture”. Exhibitions such as Hortus Deliciarum (Five Plus Art Gallery, Vienna, 2017; ICR Venice, 2019) and Felix Anima (Venice-Venice, Palazzo Ca’ Da Mosto, 2022) exemplify this trajectory, merging religious symbolism with the poetics of natural transformation. Dividing her time between her studios at Combinatul Fondului Plastic in Bucharest and in Liteni, Bucovina, she continues to create large-scale installations that interrogate the continuity between art, ritual, and ecology. Through the Cultural Association Ferma de Artă, which she co-founded, Zidaru sustains curatorial and educational initiatives that promote traditional crafts and contemporary spiritual aesthetics.