DOR/DESIRE: Solo Exhibition Featuring Thought-Provoking Paintings by Carmen Marin

On view at Țării Crișurilor Museum in Romania is a recently-executed series of over fifty intriguing paintings by Carmen Marin in an exhibition titled DOR, which can be translated from Romanian as LONGING or DESIRE. This exhibition will be on view from November 5, 2021 through February 12, 2022 at the Țării Crișurilor Museum at 1/A Armatei Române Street, 410087, Oradea, Bihor, Romania.

Showcasing thought-provoking, semi-figurative and semi-abstract portraits, landscapes and still lifes, these arresting paintings of Marin invite the viewer to reflect upon the human psyche and the creative process. Existentialism and postmodernism have been central concerns within Marin’s practice. Extensively informed by the visual vocabularies of such modernist and contemporary masters as Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Joan Mitchell, Georg Baselitz and Kiki Smith, Marin approaches each one of her canvases as a primordial undertaking in addressing vision, visuality, temporality and the human condition. “Facing every blank canvas, I attempt to reinvent myself,” reflects Marin. “There will always be continuities with and breaks from the past, just as a given present moment always remains somehow attached to its immediate past and immediate future.”

Marin received her graduate degree in painting in 2000 from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, studying under Professor Stefan Câlția. For the past two decades, the paintings of Marin have been shown extensively in Romania and recurrently throughout Europe and the United States. In 2004 Marin was awarded the Olympic Sport and Art Contest Prize in Graphic Works of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Powerfully conveying the contemporary individual’s inner reality and psychological state, these exploratory paintings of Marin suggest instances of human desire through open-ended references to archetypal narratives, anthropomorphic trees and surreal depictions of the human figure rendered as an extension of an interior or exterior setting. Curated by Adina Rentea, DOR is Marin’s first one-person museum exhibition.

The exhibition can be visited until february the 12th, 2022.