Vioara Bara

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Trained at the “Ion Grigorescu” Faculty of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where she specialised in stage design, Vioara Bara has built a multifaceted career that bridges painting and scenography. Over more than three decades of artistic practice, she had developed a distinctive visual language positioned at the intersection of neo-expressionism and feminist discourse. Her painting asserts a powerful subjectivity, characterized by gestural intensity, vivid chromatic contrasts, and a dramaturgical understanding of form rooted in her experience in theatre. As a scenographer, Bara has designed the sets for more than two hundred theatre productions, collaborating with major institutions across Romania and serving as resident artist at the “Regina Maria” Theatre in Oradea. Her pictorial work, however, unveils a deeply personal universe populated by hybrid creatures, angelic and demonic presences, and totemic symbols that explore the boundaries between the forbidden and the permitted. This iconography becomes a metaphorical investigation of moral and emotional dualities, translating the artist’s inner conflicts into visual form. Critics have described Bara’s art as an uncompromising affirmation of the self. Erwin Kessler noted that, had neo-expressionism not existed, she would have invented it. Magda Cârneci identified in her oeuvre one of the most radical articulations of feminist consciousness in Romanian contemporary painting. The artist herself conceives painting as an act of transgression and liberation—an exploration of pain, desire, and conscience through colour and form. A member of the Romanian Union of Visual Artists, UNITER, and the International Association of Art, she has exhibited extensively in Romania and abroad, consolidating a body of work that fuses theatrical vision with expressive autonomy.