CV ARTISTIC
Name: Ioana Stana
Date of Birth: November 27, 1976
Current Residence: Bucharest, Romania
SIGNIFICANT SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2025 – Tarot – FormArt Gallery – Bucharest
2024 – In the Shadow of Time – Jewish Community Center – Bucharest
2024 – Threads of Time – Odeon Theatre – Foyer – Studio Hall – Bucharest
2018 – Eshet Ghayl – series Shadows and Puppets – Jewish Community Center – Bucharest
2014 – Faces of the Golem – Romanian Cultural Institute – Hall on Aleea Alexandru no. 38 – Bucharest
2011 – Jewish Tales and Stories – Haifa Theatre – Haifa – Israel
2006 – Illustrated Genesis – Occident Galleries – Bucharest 1994 – Watercolor – Apollo Gallery – Bucharest
SIGNIFICANT GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
2024 – Bionantism – Bistro 44 – Hotel Liad – Bucharest
2018 – Origins – Form and Color – Palace of the Parliament – Constantin Brâncuși Hall – Bucharest
2014 – Dream Paintings – Palace of the Parliament – Constantin Brâncuși Hall – Bucharest
– Puzzle – Jewish Community Center – Bucharest – Romania
2011 – Graphics – L’Objectif Subjectif Salon – Esch-sur-Alzette – Luxembourg
1991 – Tempera – Annual Drawing and Painting Salon – Nicolae Tonitza High School – Bucharest
1990 – Tempera – Annual Drawing and Painting Salon – Nicolae Tonitza High School – Bucharest
SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS:
2024 – Album
2024 – series: Threads of Time – Painting (acrylic) – Oscar Print Publishing – Sand Waves – reissued – deluxe edition – poetry and illustration – Oscar Print Publishing
– Bilingual Calambur – deluxe edition – poetry and color illustration – Oscar Print Publishing
2022 – Sand Waves – poetry and color illustration – Little Star Publishing
2022 – Sand Waves – poetry and black-and-white illustration – Literagraf Publishing
2011 – Jewish Tales and Stories – volumes 1 and 2 – illustration – Coresi Publishing 2023 – Personal Graphic Album – self-published
PRESS EXCERPTS:
“(…) 19 Luxembourgish artists and 4 foreign artists gathered at the exhibition organized by CAL, the Circle of Artists from Luxembourg… the works exhibited by Romanian artist Ioana Stana have a perfectly balanced artistic composition, radiating strength. Magic and mystery define this ensemble of compositions (…)” — Luxemburger Wort
“(…) love that transcends the Universe, blending with it like a beautiful, eternal emotion of the human spirit… Love is a form of existence of matter and spirit… This would be the legend of the graphic selection exhibited by Ioana Stana at the European art exhibition in Luxembourg (…)” — Cotidianul
“High-quality illustrations, sumptuous colors veiled in expressionist lyricism, wrapped in a mist like a dream, sometimes flooded with solar brightness, other times laden with strange shadows of vital, nostalgic visions.” — Zoltan Terner, Jurnalul săptămânii – no. 127
“…It was not easy for an artist in love with graphics or watercolor to transition to acrylic on canvas exhibitions. This required a different technique and a new experience. But for Ioana Stana, ‘New’ is a way of life.
Born in Bucharest in 1976, she studied visual arts at Nicolae Tonitza Art High School, then pursued a Law degree. She decided to move to New York. Perhaps that’s why ‘Hope’ is so evident in her paintings.
After several exhibitions in Bucharest early in her career, she participated in a graphic art exhibition in Luxembourg alongside 19 other young visual artists from Europe.
Her works always reveal and explore a magical continent with a deep philosophical layer. One could say that through emigration, Ioana Stana was placed in the position of a Creator, becoming the privileged being who benefits from another world—the inner one—a rich world full of unexpected events and miracles.
I believe Ioana prefers a serene philosophy of time’s passage as a sense of beauty and fulfillment. She also leads a very active life, always thinking about tomorrow and what comes next.
In everything she creates, we feel an aspiration toward infinity that marks both the existence of the human being and her own. I believe this is a perspective of exile, of fate, of the Diaspora, resolved through the mental transcendence of any limit.
Critics in Luxembourg wrote that Ioana’s works contain both magic and mystery. This is the strongest impression left by this exhibition—the idea of enduring magic…” — Dr. Irina Cajal Marin, opening of the exhibition at Occident Gallery, April 2006
“Ioana’s creations carry me to the story of Time. Her works are like a deep journey into the intimate core of self-rediscovery. In the mysterious realm of her stories, transposed into images, we often relive the extended path of childhood, of lost and sometimes rediscovered innocence. Her canvases provoke the viewer’s emotions to traverse time in a continuous oscillation from the balance of reality to the comfort of childhood, where everything still felt right.
In the fairytale atmosphere of her compositions, I remembered the story of Hansel and Gretel, but in an extended form, like a well-defined path of pure childhood experiences.
Then my thoughts wandered to Ariadne’s Thread, the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, Theseus’ wait… I relived those paths that seem without return, those abandonments left behind, but also the hope of change, of escaping situations that sometimes seem far too convoluted.
The thread of time, unraveling and reweaving, carrying each of our existences, is present in many of these works. Here, the thread appears as an eternally moving element, searching for a path… one we never know where it leads… Panta Rhei, this immutable flow of time, in continuous change, ultimately leads to our own transformation.
The entire Threads of Time series presents itself as Penelope’s canvas, eternally awaiting Ulysses, a mystical struggle through balance, through patience, with Time itself, in a perpetual attempt to deceive it, to hold it still. The characters are in a state of quiet waiting, seemingly.
The use of the gourd as a central, repetitive element—the pumpkin of immortality—brings with it the symbolism of eternal life, invoking health, prosperity, abundance, natural blessing, in a permanent connection with the everyday, with surrounding reality.
Ioana Stana succeeds in conveying time and its passage, along with the viewer’s personal questions. The entire series is a test of imagination and lucidity that flows abundantly from her canvases.
Composition and chromatics are balanced, stable, the message being one of contemplation. A heavy theme, approached accordingly.” — Filomela-Elena Bucur, Visual Artist, Member of U.A.P.
“Strong emotion reverberated by an ineluctably aesthetic and provocative visual sensation unequivocally defines Ioana Stana’s exhibition – Threads of Time.
As the title itself suggests, the artist reveals a series of works born around significant temporal milestones, embroidered in a pause of memory on the precious fabric of vibrant fibers of feelings and strong passions, on the rough cords of self-searching and the thin threads of illusions, often gently woven in suffering.
This endeavor, shaped by artistically sensitive gestures, seems like an evocative tapestry of a universal time, past and future, unconsciously laid on emotional layers, with tenderness and personality, subtly revealing from the shadows an assumed resignation that constantly emerges from behind the canvases.
Along the delicately imposed path, the viewer is tempted by the inquisitive eyes of the characters populating her paintings to join the magical journey—from the beginnings of the search for Truth and Love to the moment of answers to dilemmas and the consolidation of beliefs—discreetly expressed through a manifesto contesting counterfeit and obscure values, gestated in the void discovered in the harmonious shape of the gentle gourds guarding, from behind the fire or the spinning wheel, the stories told by the hearth.
For nothing evokes this atmosphere more than that of a fairytale—playful and mysterious at the same time—in which we take refuge in ineffable moments.
We find ourselves in the children who gaze in wonder at the nests with eggs of fantastic birds, guarded by elves and fauns, becoming from watchers the watched, by eyes hidden in the most unexpected corners, to watch over us. And, without realizing, we enter this encrypted world where reality intertwines with the dreamlike in a diaphanous network of transparent strips behind which sleepy, tearful, or amazed faces appear, naturally completing the scene.
Visible are the symbols Ioana proposes to express her emotional states and sincerely reveal the interior of her own existence. In our attempt to decipher them, we rediscover familiar moments and sensations, memories of our own experiences—in signs of fertility, healing, blood, faith, or doubt.
This artistic journey represents a candid and liberating testimony of emotions, mirroring us in the circular time of a dream we wish to keep alive.” — Irena Andrea Prodănescu, Architect, Member of U.A.R.