Could I live here, and who would I become if I did?
Jecza & Olaru Gallery presents A Room of My Dreams, an exhibition exploring the space between contemporary art and collectible design through the intimate territory of the domestic interior.
There are rooms that shelter us and rooms that shape us. Rooms that preserve our gestures, silences and desires, and rooms that, over time, seem to learn who we are. Living in a space is never a neutral act. The domestic interior becomes an extension of memory and identity, while the objects that inhabit it participate, quietly, in the formation of the person who lives among them.
A Room of My Dreams is the first exhibition at Jecza & Olaru Gallery devoted to the encounter between contemporary art and collectible design. The gallery is imagined as a possible interior, somewhere between a domestic landscape and a psychological space. At its centre lies a deceptively simple question: Could I live here, and who would I become if I did?
The title inevitably opens a literary field of associations, recalling the ways in which rooms can become spaces of consciousness. In Anne Sexton’s The Room of My Life, the room becomes an affective map in which ordinary objects participate in the articulation of the self. Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms similarly turns the interior into a territory of memory, apparitions and identities still in formation. The room is therefore more than the setting of a life. It becomes one of the conditions through which that life takes shape.
The objects brought together in the exhibition occupy an intermediate territory where use, sculpture, design and image intersect. They can be lived with and used, yet they exceed their practical function. This ambiguity lies at the heart of collectible design.
Historically, furniture and the applied arts occupied a secondary position in relation to the so-called fine arts. Painting and sculpture were associated with the autonomy of the artwork, while furniture, ceramics, textiles and objects of everyday use were more often understood through their function, their craftsmanship or their relationship to an interior. Their recognition as forms of artistic expression was consequently gradual and contested.
The recent history of collectible design has developed precisely within this tension. It questions established distinctions between the useful object and the artwork, between edition and unique piece, between craft and artistic creation. At the same time, the collectible object remains suspended between accessibility and rarity, use and contemplation, manual gesture and cultural value.
Within the interior imagined by the exhibition, art and design exist alongside one another as different ways of intensifying the experience of inhabitation. A chair can acquire the presence of a sculpture; a table can behave like a small piece of architecture; a decorative object can contain an entire narrative about the body, memory and time.
Together, the works form a heterogeneous landscape of different materials, scales and forms. Their coherence comes less from stylistic uniformity than from an affective relationship between objects and the space around them. They accompany everyday life while also interrupting it, making the familiar slightly strange and asking us to reconsider what it means to live with things.
Adela Jecza has been active in the development of Romania’s collectible design scene through projects including Epretext, founded in 2019, and the RAD Design section, curated from its first edition in 2024. In 2025, she co-founded Valuable Paris with Bogdan Ciocodeică, further extending this dialogue into an international context. Her architectural background and work across exhibition-making and collectible design inform the gallery’s approach to the relationship between objects, space and cultural context.
A Room of My Dreams does not describe an ideal room. It proposes a possible one.
A room in which things are never entirely mute or neutral. They look back at us, reflect us and subtly alter us.
A room that knows us, and that we gradually learn to know.
Artists
Radu Abraham
AÈ02
Crina Arghirescu Rogard
Michele Bressan
Abel Carcamo
Bogdan Ciocodeică for NUMBERED EDITION
Constantin Flondor
Cosmin Florea
Oláh Gyárfás
Șerban Ionescu
Florin Magda
Tincuța Marin
Sho Ota
Gheorghe Petrașcu
Bogdan Rața
Cristian Răduță
Marius Rițiu
Andrei Tudoran
About Jecza and Olaru Gallery
Jecza & Olaru is a Bucharest-based gallery founded around a dialogue between contemporary art and design. The gallery brings together the experience of gallerist Andrei Jecza and designer Andra Olaru, founder of ALMAZ, with an exhibition programme conceived around the relationship between artistic practices, design and cultural memory. Its exhibition architecture was developed by Attila Kim Architects.
The gallery’s Bucharest space is located at Grigore Gafencu 65, Bucharest, and is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00-19:00.
Curatorial Direction
Adela Jecza is an architect, adviser and curator working in the field of collectible design. She founded Epretext in 2019, curated the first RAD Design edition in 2024, and co-founded Valuable Paris in 2025 with Bogdan Ciocodeică. She studied architecture in Timișoara and pursued further studies at Bauhaus University Weimar, NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego and Parsons School of Design in New York. She currently oversees the Jecza Foundation and the collectible design programme at Jecza & Olaru.
The exhibition is open from 3 October to 29 November 2026 at Jecza & Olaru Gallery, Bucharest.
