Zina Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Maria Balea, titled Circadian Rhythms, which will showcase the artists’ most recent series of works, primarily paintings as well as objects. The opening will take place on Friday, March 4th, between 6-9 PM.

As we have slowly fallen under the illusion that we no longer depend on our body’s interior clock, that our cells follow our whims, the body gets rushed among the many things we want so desperately to catch and improve in our everyday. For what does one do when exhaustion creeps in? All life has evolved with a day/night cycle, where darkness is a full matter, helping reset the perspective of the world. Messing it up can hurt. Taking a poetic leap into the notion of inner time, Maria Balea reflects on the increasing exhaustion of the body, the turmoil that doesn’t let it stay still. And so, one needs to find some sort of refuge, to get attuned.

Text: Edith Lázár

Maria Balea (b. 1990) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. Her practice involves primarily painting, collage, objects, and installations. Drawn to the details of artifacts and plants, she looks at the way some of the smallest shapes and cracks in the surfaces construct a (living) object, and how such details can be then unfolded and represented. In this endeavor, she takes cues from the apparent flatness of early Renaissance paintings and renderings of space, architectural elements and textures, to foster fluid materiality. The works are often imbued with the artist’s personal self-reflection on the larger questions of life which burden many of us. She was the co-founder of Superliquidato, an alternative art space for digital and experimental media springing from the internet, and active between 2014-2017 within the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca. Her works have been shown in art spaces and galleries such as Fabrica de Pensule, Aici Acolo in Cluj-Napoca, Centrul Artelor Vizuale Multimedia, Pavilion and Goodbuy Gallery in Bucharest or Fort Delta Gallery in Melbourne.