RAD Art Fair 2025: Marius Bercea, Ștefan Bertalan, Tincuța Marin, Laurian Popa, Cristian Sida, Péter Jecza, Florin Magda, Bogdan Rața
Overview
Marius Bercea is widely recognized as one of the leading figures of the Cluj School of Painting - a loosely affiliated group of artists who emerged in Cluj-Napoca after the 1989 Romanian Revolution. Known for his vividly layered, psychologically charged works, Bercea blends personal memory, cultural history, and imagined geographies into a visual language that is both intimate and expansive. Over the past two decades, Bercea’s paintings have explored the social and emotional landscapes shaped by consumerism, capitalism, and migration. His richly textured compositions oscillate between realism and fiction, glamour and decay, utopia and collapse. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the thresholds—where past and present, East and West, private and collective experience intersect.
Ștefan Bertalan is considered an essential figure of the artistic scene in Timișoara, where he lived and passed away. In 1965, together with Roman Cotoșman and Constantin Flondor, he founded Group 111, the first experimental art group in communist Romania. Five years later, he became a leading member of the Sigma group, which he co-founded alongside Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan, Elisei Rusu, Ion Gaita, and Lucian Codreanu.
Diverse and hybrid, Bertalan’s work combines continuous research with an ongoing inquiry—akin to a logbook—into the nature of creation and humanity’s place in the universe. Through its variations and metamorphoses, his art reflects a researcher deeply aware of the laws governing the universe.
The diversity of disciplines and tools he employed, as well as the profoundly hybrid nature of a practice that merges the most descriptive language with the invention of graphic and geometric schemes—where abstraction and figuration are inseparable—attests to a remarkably original investigation. This retrospective is intended to highlight this unique body of work. Moreover, his passion for optics and mechanics, botany and geology, astronomy, and all forms of systems reflects a persistent desire to understand the world through observation.
Tincuța Marin was born 1995 in Galati and graduated from The University of Art and Design, Cluj, Romania, in 2019. Her recent solo exhibitions include Gloaming at Galeria Plan B in Berlin; Where the Sun Sleeps at Oratorio dei Crociferi in Venice; Purring Figure at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Distant Realities at Jecza Gallery in Timisoara. Tincuta Marin's work have also been exhibited recently in the following group exhibitions: There were times I wanted to change the world, Paltim Timisoara, Timisoara; One Eye Laughing, the Other Crying. Art From Romania. Ovidiu Șandor Collection, The International Cultural Centre, Krakow; A Tower of Birds, Conector – On – Off, Cluj-Napoca; autoportret, Galeria Plan B, Berlin and The Picasso Effect, Museum of Recent Art (MARe), Bucharest.
Laurian Popa was born in 1980 in Arad, where he lives and works. He is a Romanian visual artist, licensed in Painting at the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timisoara, Prof. Constantin Flondor. In this newly created dimension, the meaning of objects becomes confused, strange, sometimes giving the impression of arranged images, well-ordered “installations” that are required to be painted, where the size of the objects is disproportionate, related to the actual size of the support. The attempt to observe the reality of an object, to “feel” the corporeality, to put it out of function and to place it in disfunction, is the way the artist intervenes, by which the object observed becomes another, in a new image.
Cristian Sida is a Romanian contemporary artist, born in 1974, known for his dynamic and expressive paintings that blend figurative and abstract elements. He studied at the University of Art and Design in Timișoara, where he later became a professor. Sida has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, with his works being featured in prestigious galleries and collections. His art explores themes of identity, memory, and transformation, often characterized by bold colors and fluid compositions.
Péter Jecza (b. 1939 - d. 2009), renowned nationally and internationally, is regarded as a pioneer in contemporary Romanian sculpture. His body of work, comprising over 1200 cataloged pieces, explores a wide spectrum of sculptural styles.
Born on October 16, 1939, in Sfântu Gheorghe, Covasna, Romania, Peter Jecza graduated from the "Ion Andreescu" Academy of Arts in Cluj in 1963. He is a member of the Fine Arts Union of Romania and has served as a professor at the Academy of Arts in Timișoara.
His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions across Europe, including Wuppertal, Bucharest, Berlin, Zürich, Düsseldorf, Basel, Mannheim, and Timișoara, among others, between 1972 and 1996. Internationally, he has participated in notable events such as the Barcelona Biennial (1975), and multiple editions of the “Dante” Biennial in Ravenna (1975–1987), as well as in group exhibitions with the "R.B.K." Group in Wuppertal from 1973 to 1986.
RAD ART FAIR SCULPTURE PARK ARTISTS
Péter Jecza
Florin Magda (b. April 22, 1978, Alba Iulia) is a Romanian sculptor whose practice fuses the poetics of everyday life with the material resilience of metal.
A graduate of the University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca—BA (2002) and MA in Sculpture—Magda returned to his hometown, where in 2019 he opened HANGAR-F, a combined studio and artist-run space that anchors Alba Iulia’s contemporary-art scene.
Magda’s sculptures frequently reference childhood and the logic of play, probing how children use games to understand, resist, or reshape the world. This research culminated in Dulapul cu jucării / The Toy Cupboard (stainless steel, 2024), which won the Peter Jecza Award – Sculpture of the Year. Installed publicly in Timișoara, the 2.4 × 0.9 × 2 m work functions as both monument and invitation to imagine.
Bogdan Rață is a sculptor from the young generation of the artists. His new hybrid realism is finding new genetic forms of human anatomy in search of a new posthumanism. Based in a “forgotten future”, his work reproduces “replicas of reality” reminiscent of the virtual world in the film Blade Runner. Rata multiplies human parts (fingers, ears, and so on) and combines them into new life forms. The newborn creatures seem to result from strange experiments with the human body in an esthetics lab. Rata’s works forge a contextual change of the anatomic detail through its obsessive multiplication. The materials used, and the resulting industrial look, question the assault on individual personality in a climate of commercial branding uniformity. The concept of “hand-foot” and the “unsuccessful blessing” symbol strengthens the idea behind the work, delicately propelling it into the realm of grotesque. The torso also evokes a twist of reality, the socially provocative themes of sexual identity and the hermaphrodite. He uses new materials as polystyrene, industrial paint, plaster, synthetic resin.
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