Nadina Pascariu is a Romanian painter and visual artist whose main field of work is related to her encounter with the Beauty – the source for her paintings of nature, people, objects and surroundings, mainly from Bucharest and Horezu, the places where she lives and works. She studied Fine Arts at the Art University of Bucharest with the graphic artist Nistor Coita and the painter Horea Paştina. Her work of Master of Visual Arts from 2006 is a proposal for a new orthodox christian iconographic model, “The Icon of the Parables”. She had a short collaboration with Dana Art Gallery and exhibited with this group between 2010 – 2012. She received Arhitext Design Magazine Photo Contest Award for the Photoreport section in 2001. She worked as graphic designer in the frame of different NGOs’ projects and as an art teacher for preschool till highschool pupils. Many of her works are held in private collections in Romania, France, Germany, the United States and Israel.

Nadina Pascariu se defineşte ca pictoriţă şi artist vizual al cărei domeniu de creaţie este în mod fundamental determinat de întâlnirea sa cu Frumosul. Este vorba de o abordare nu doar estetică ci şi conceptuală, având în vedere că această dimensiune a frumuseţii reprezintă de fiecare dată regăsirea primei impresii asupra vieţii: lumina din copilărie, ceea ce conferă sens existenţei. Subiectele în care o regăseşte sunt diverse: natură, oameni, obiecte şi împrejurimi, mai ales din Bucureşti şi Horezu, locurile unde trăieşte şi lucrează. A studiat artele plastice la Universitatea de Arte din Bucureşti cu graficianul Nistor Coita şi cu pictorul Horea Paştina. Lucrarea ei de masterat în arte vizuale din 2006 este o propunere de nou model iconografic creştin, „Icoana pildelor”. A avut o scurtă colaborare cu Dana Art Gallery între 2010 – 2012. A primit premiul revistei Arhitext Design pentru fotoreportaj în 2001. A lucrat ca designer grafic în colaborare cu diferite ONG-uri şi ca profesor de desen şi pictură pentru preşcolari şi elevi de liceu. Multe din picturile ei se află în colecţii private din România, Franţa, Germania, Statele Unite şi Israel.

CV

EDUCATION
2006 MFA in Visual Arts, National University of Arts of Bucharest, Romania
2003 BFA Painting Department, National University of Arts of Bucharest, Romania

SOLO EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)
2019 “Grădina Macăi” (”Maca’s Garden”), NP Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2019 “Larks’ Castle (sketches to nothing)”, NP Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2018 “Jurnaliera din Noptieră”, NP Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2016 “Flashbacks, Braziliei 1-3”, Carol Galleries, Bucharest, Romania
2014 “Siemprevivas”, Colony Art, Bucharest, Romania
2010 “CU fLORI” (“WITH fLOWERS”), Dalles University, Bucharest, Romania
2007 “many SELF-PORTRAITS”, Simeza Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2007 “ALTA ARA – Hurezi Monastery”, Octav Doicescu Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2007 “Bucharest of today – a small anthology of local identity”, Miclescu House, Bucharest (within the urban culture manifestation Art Delivery on Verona Street)
2007 “Painting Exhibition”, “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest, Romania
2004 “Horezu”, photo exhibition, Hurezi Monastery, Horezu, Vâlcea, Romania

GROUP EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)
2018 “Niculene”, NP Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2012 “RUBIK Cube”, Odeon Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2012 “Far from Loneliness”, St. Pantelimon Complex, Bucharest, Romania
2012 “Loneliness in the Crowd”, Odeon Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2011 “Far Too Much Purple”, Café Verona, Bucharest, Romania
2011 “Alter Ego”, Odeon Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2011 “Bucharest of Yesterday and Today”, Elite Prof Art Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2011 “The Graphic Salon”, Elite Prof Art Gallery, Bucharest, Romania
2010 “Connexions through Art”, Café Verona, Bucharest, Romania
2007 “Moldavian Halls”, Chişinău / Moldova – Bacău / Romania
2006 UNA Master Graduates Exhibition, TNB, Bucharest, Romania
2005 “UAP (Fine Arts Union of Romania) Receivings”, Artis, Bucharest, Romania
2003 UNA Graduates Exhibition, TNB, Bucharest, Romania
2003 The International Photo and Film Camp from Bistriţa’s Exhibition, UNAgaleria, Bucharest, Romania
2002 TIAV (The International Fair of Visual Arts),TNB, Bucharest, Romania
2001 TIAV (The International Fair of Visual Arts),TNB, Bucharest, Romania
2000 Biennale of Painting “Gheorghe Petraşcu”, Târgovişte, Romania

Publications References
Iolanda Malamen, “Tinere artiste” (“Young Artists”), Luceafărul de dimineață nr. 2 – febr. 2019 [1104]
Pavel Şuşară, “The World beyond the Flowers” – Siemprevivas exhibition catalogue 2014
Maria Magdalena Crişan, “Destinul autoportretului” (“The self-portratit’s destiny”), Observator Cultural nr. 384 – aug. 2007

Collections
Works held in private collections in Romania, France, the United States and Israel.

Art Camps
2002 The International Photo and Film Camp from Bistriţa, Bistriţa-Năsăud, Romania
2001 The Painting Camp from Mogoşoaia Palace, Romania

Awards
2001 Arhitext Design Photo Contest Award for the Photoreport section

Teaching
2012-2015 painting classes for preschool children
2009-2010 educational coordinator within “Priveşte Horezu” regional development project implemented by FPDL (Partners Foundation for Local Development, Bucharest)
2007-2008 art teacher at C. A. Rosetti Highschool from Bucharest

Graphic Works
design/ branding/ illustration (digital & hand-drawn): logos, posters for cultural events, book covers, handbook illustration and layout (i.e. a series of five handbooks under the UNDP Project: “Developing Conflict Analysis and Resolution Capacity in Romania” ROM/00/002) and other visual items.

Theoretical Researches
“Regard Horezu, Costeşi and Vaideeni” (FPDL, 2010) – a presentation catalog of the heritage monuments from these 3 Romanian localities; only RO version https://issuu.com/nadinapascariu/docs/catalog_horezu/1

“32 concepts” (UNARTE, 2006) – a glossary of the main art-related concepts in the Ancient Greek culture; only RO version https://www.scribd.com/doc/97840776/Nadina-Pascariu-32-de-Concepte

“The Icon of the Parables” (UNARTE, 2006) – a proposal for a new orthodox christian iconographic model; not published.

Reviews

Iolanda Malamen
„Tinere artiste”, Luceafărul de dimineață, nr. 2/ februarie 2019 [1104]

…Vizibil atentă să recreeze o stilistică a imediatului empatic, artista găsește în intensitatea naturii branșarea compulsivă și emoțională necesară. Verdele abundă în străluciri și ritmuri de nuanțe; ici-colo, tușe cromatice calde dau un plus de lealitate popasurilor vizuale ale Nadinei Pascariu. Narator cursiv, având o tehnică bună, care induce o senzație de libertate scripturală fervidă, artista a proiectat într-o suită de imagini flexibile o natură senzuală care triumfă, comunică și deblochează convențiile. Purtând cu sine limbaje personale bine definite și, totuși, fără să se îndepărteze întru totul de tradiție, ci meditând semnificativ asupra ei, Nadina Pascariu îi redă realului funcția sa naturală.
Desenele au delicatețe, subtilitate, concizie și rafinament, fie că sunt portrete, fie că reprezintă pridvorul unei biserici sau o imagine fugară din natură…

Lesley Constable
former art critic/ journalist, art gallery curator, university instructor, teacher from Ohio, now working as a poet at Free Spirit Art Studios and Retreats, in Santa Fe
a virtual encounter in August 2015

Your work has a very raw and immediate aspect to it. You know your stuff – form, composition – and it presents as akin to what was loosely described at the Outsider Art movement of the 80s and 90s…very nice. I love the immediacy of your work, how situated regading place and time it is but with your skew and your particular emotional urgency to it, informing it, as the extra added attraction. I would love to live with your work as having a place on the walls of my house. Completely, energized and magical form – familiar yet animated and slightly askew having a life of its own. Very grounded in art history yet completely your own.

Pavel Şuşară, art critic
July 2014

At the beginning of this year I wrote a review for the catalogue of Nadina Pascariu’s exhibition “Siemprevivas” hosted by Colony Art Gallery in Bucharest.

In my title, “The World beyond the Flowers”, I emphasize already the main characteristics describing Nadina’s painting in this moment of her artistic evolution: the approach of the classical genres in a personal manner which transform them into real visual events, surpassing the conventional presumed both by the genre and the motif. By that, her paintings benefit from what I identify as being the main quality of a work of art – its potential to be in permanent motion, to reconstruct its nature and message according to what the watcher is willing to see and understand, by looking at it.

Explosive temper, with an excellent capacity of perceiving and using the chromatic vehicle, Nadina Pascariu places herself, paradoxically somehow, between the temptation of a spontaneous, non-programmatic Expressionism, and the vague Spiritualism, that vocation of celebrating the creation, which the group Prolog coagulated and institutionalized in the Romanian Painting at the end of the 20th century, with significant extensions in our contemporary painting.

Between an enhanced Horea Paştina, with a straight connection to form and colour, and a Mihai Sârbulescu escaped from the optical blend to rediscover the statuary form, the intrinsic monumentality of the motif, Nadina Pascariu defines her own expression, one in which the vocation for the language, the temptation of the research and the joy of contemplation become legitimate parts of the same unique reality.

Devis Grebu
Bucharest, the 28th of July 2014

The first contacts with Nadina’s art took place no more than two years ago, by chance, when I discovered her on the facebook social network. Her works intrigued me and as a result of this interest I made all the efforts to see them in original, achievement which enhanced my initial opinion.

Not long after that, she inaugurated an exhibition at the Colony Art Gallery in Bucharest, at the opening of which I could not unfortunately participate (since I reside in Paris), but I succeeded however to visit it during the period that was open (March 2014). I can state with all the heaviness of my visual artist of international reputation experience that I was thrilled – and again not only by the painter’s personality but from all the points of view, from that of the beauty, of the profoundness, of the exquisiteness, of the elegancy… of the immortality… without exaggeration.

Mihai Plămădeală, art critic, curator
June 2014

Nadina Pascariu’s painting distinguishes itself through refinement and discretion, qualities that are determined both by a special sense of the colour and by the artistic will, through the choices she makes. An extensive chromatic palette, ingenuity of the lines, a thorough organization of the compositions. The rejection of the subject sets the proposed images free from temporality and, up to a point, from contextual.

What really matters is the representation, not its real correspondent. Thus, the personages and the objects depicted by Nadina have a life of their own, different from the one of the real models or of the sources that inspired them. Her canvases raise questions more about painting rather than the iconography. The still lifes themselves, particularly the Everlastings that recurrently appear in her works, are pure visual signs, not symbols of passing, becoming, oblivion, vanity or death. The self-portraits, as well as the portraits, speak more about the painter’s state of mind while painting them rather than what lies behind the faces who were posing as models or were hypostatized as personages.

The artist, who relates herself to a great extent to the interwar Romanian painting, does not forget to put the necessary postmodern quotes to the seen and to the unseen elements from her compositions. A series of two-way relations arise, between tradition and modernity, through which the possible dichotomies are suppressed. The result is a succulent, concise, magnetic, systematic painting and yet not restricted by any morphological corpus. Total freedom and a subjective truth of the art: this would be Nadina’s stylistic mark.