Cristian Raduta Romania, b. 1982

Cristian Raduta (b. 1982) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. His artistic practices include sculptures and installations. He is a student of the sculptor Mircea Spătaru (class of 2005). From 2006-2008, Cristian spent two years at the Accademia di Romania in Rome. In 2013 he is award a PhD degree in Visual Arts at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, he is currently an associate lecturer at the University's Sculpture Department. Since 2008 he has been represented by the 418 Gallery with involvement in numerous individual and group projects. Christian is one of the co-founders of Sandwich gallery space. His work can be found in public and private collections in Romania and abroad, such as The National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Romania Art in Embassies: US Department of State,and The Fourwood Contemporary Art Collection, Romania.

 

Christian adoppts the mysterious species ‘rhino’ to represent the monumentality, which is an important theme in the history of sculptural art. He reviews the historic monumental icon of obelisks in a radical way. Under his approaches, the obelisks are hold up by moveable objects and rhinos, while questioning the existing definition of monumentality being fixed and stable. Moreover, he brings in contemporary topics such as space exploration, the form of standing rockets to become a symbolism for a utopian dream.

 

Since the last decade, Christian has created a number of surreal animal characters with methods of metaphor and simile. Most of them are made of industrial and bricolage materials in a simplified form. Under handmade traces, Christian expresses the tension between materials of contrast properties. Consciously, he is neither conservative nor revolutionary, but wandering the in-between space, allowing the instability to directly reveal in his artworks. A sense of crisis is hidden in his humorous and witty expressions. We feel the utopian world and the ambitious gestures of heroism, while to be called back to the reflection of social issues by their fragile/incomplete images.