Dialogue with 5 emerging artists, at Bucharest Design Festival Young 

About art, about inspiration gaps and their remedies, about the origin of some of the contemporary art works – I talked with 5 young artists, participants of Bucharest Design Festival Young section. Go and see their art works this month (and keep this page open to decipher more accurately their art works). 

* BDF Young reunites 24 de artists and designers – former participants at DIPLOMA Show – in one unique exhibition that explores the process of building a career in creative field – at MNAR (21st of May – 30 May 2026) 
* More info about Bucharest Design Festival, the exhibitions and the program –  on institute.ro/bucharestdesignfestival.

Daniel Roșca – @daniel.roscaa
About the art work presented at BDF Young 2026… Between beauty and degradation, the works explore how ecological collapse becomes absorbed into everyday life until it turns almost invisible, a condition close to the idea of hyper-normalization. Water runs throughout the works as a recurring symbol of instability:  in the Beginning series, the landscapes feel cold and suspended somewhere between calm and dissolution. The Toxic Beauty of Oil Spills and Earth’s Heart Tachycardia contrast visually attractive surfaces with the anxiety hidden beneath them, while the installation Declining Balance references deforestation and the fragile relationship between nature and human intervention. The works also reflect the psychological condition of a world obsessed with immediacy, where a slow but inevitable degradation becomes normalized through routine and repetition.

Art for me means… For me, art exists somewhere between curiosity, play, and responsibility. It is a space where intuition, experimentation, anxieties, and ideas can take shape, and where even small gestures can shift perception. I’m interested in the continuous search for an ideal that is impossible to fully reach or control, which is probably why I constantly return to nature. For me, it remains the closest image of an ideal: fragile, chaotic, and in continuous transformation.
The perfect remedy for an inspiration gap is… Walking aimlessly between the city and nature. I’m drawn to the abrupt shift from concrete, industrial structures, and artificial city lights toward a completely different kind of vitality, something organic, unpredictable, and impossible to fully control. Most of the time, ideas appear exactly within the tension between those two worlds.

Andrei Nuțu – @_andreinutu_
About the art work presented at BDF Young 2026… These three works map out where I have been in the last few years. Each one belongs to a different stage in how I think about the surface. Metousiosis (2018) is the oldest. Part of my bachelor’s project, the most classical of the three, rooted in drawing and compositional structure. The title was already pointing somewhere I would keep coming back to. One substance turning into another while still keeping its form. The Front Line (2020) is where things shifted. During my master’s I started looking for texture, for a more living presence within the material itself. The drawing is still there, but buried in the fresco. You have to spend a moment with it before it shows up. I like it when the image is not handed to the viewer, when finding it is part of the interaction with the work. Vessels of Time – The Passage (2025) is where I am right now. Bringing the metal in opened up a direction I want to continue exploring. It lets me work with more volume and move beyond the flat logic of the canvas.. The surface starts to feel like an object, a vessel of its own, which is also what the title is about. This is the direction I want to continue developing: bringing different materials and media into dialogue. Put together, they are less a timeline and more a conversation. 

Art for me means… A way of becoming more attentive to what usually goes unnoticed. It gives weight and presence to fragile, overlooked things and brings us back to a more conscious relationship with the world around us. Art holds the imperfect under its light and asks us to truly look.
The perfect remedy for an inspiration gap is… To return to the curiosity that first made you want to create. It helps clear away the pressure, uncertainty, and noise that can slowly build around the process, and brings you back to a more honest relationship with your work. You do not wait for inspiration, you set the table and let it walk in. 

Otilia Efros – @otilia.efros 
About the art work presented at BDF Young 2026… There are two works from her 2022 bachelor’s degree series entitled All The Gifts, a project that references the myth of Pandora’s Box, alongside three additional works created after completing the Master’s program in Sculpture/Ceramics at the Faculty of Arts and Design. Passion is a sculpture modeled in white clay, fired at 1000°C and glazed in red at 1050°C. The ceramic form, articulated through fluid volumes and tactile tensions reminiscent of cellular or visceral morphologies, investigates the relationship between corporeality and organic abstraction, suggesting matter in a continuous state of expansion and transformation. Fatigue drips slowly like tar is an ensemble composed of two freely modeled stoneware pieces, glazed and fired at 1050°C. The work proposes a meditation on the transformation of matter and the instability of inner forms, oscillating between the organic body and the geological fragment. The intensely black surfaces, marked in certain areas by deep navy-blue iridescences, absorb light, intensifying the presence of darkness and obscurity. The other three works were created after the completion of the master’s program, beginning in 2025, a period during which the artist’s attention turned almost exclusively toward free-form porcelain modeling. They are Farnace, modeled in porcelain paste, created under the strong influence of repeated listenings to the opera Farnace by Antonio Vivaldi, particularly the deeply moving interpretation of contralto Nathalie Stutzmann. The sculpture presents a hybrid anthropomorphic form situated at the intersection of figuration and biomorphism. 4 arms-shape is a freely modeled porcelain work, that proposes an ambiguous territory situated between the natural and the artificial, between organic growth and deliberate construction. The elongated vertical forms, arranged in a rhythmic succession, evoke both biological structures – thorns, excrescences, coral fragments – and a type of archaic, almost defensive architecture. Porcelain Shape is a ceramic sculpture that asserts itself not through monumentality, but through the density of the visual experience it concentrates: an object that invites the viewer’s gaze to traverse, compare, and construct meanings within an open, speculative register. 

Art for me means… A form of addiction. Sometimes I experience it as a life partner: it makes me happy, but it can also make me sad. It “punishes” me when I make mistakes, bringing both satisfaction and disappointment. Art energizes me and, at the same time, relaxes me. It pushes me to work until my whole body aches, yet it also nourishes me. In all its forms, art remains a constant and powerful presence in my life, impossible to ignore.
The perfect remedy for an inspiration gap is… Study. But it has to be a rigorous, almost draconian kind of study, with complete dedication to reproducing as faithfully as possible what I choose to explore. My greatest interests are ancient sculpture, Romanesque sculpture and the early centuries of Byzantine art. Of course, the result never truly becomes what those masters achieved… yet it is precisely through this process of study that unexpected things begin to emerge – things I could never have foreseen.

Daia Grigore (DAIA) – @daia_dianagrigore
About the art work presented at BDF Young 2026… Frica nu are păr (Fear has no hair) – the project was created as an interactive, reverse-role book ”written” by children that teaches adults about their own anxieties. It works as a guide through the minds of children, detailing how they imagine fear based on the simple question: If your fear were a character, what would it look like? The Harvest, One, Self, Down to Earth, Look within, Underwater love – a collection of personal illustrations exploring the connections we create with nature, with one another, and ultimately, with ourselves.

Art for me means…  Noticing what often goes unnoticed, and turning it into something that invites others to see it too.
The perfect remedy for an inspiration gap is… To stop trying so hard to find it. When I clear my mind and simply look at my surroundings, that is when inspiration finds its way back.

Ioana Tocoaie – @ioanatocoaie 
About the art work presented at BDF Young 2026… The works I will present within this event are part of a visible evolution, beginning with my bachelor’s project, continuing through my master’s project, and extending into a more recent series of works. However, I have noticed that my practice has become increasingly focused on deepening scenographic and visual poetics. I became attached to this form of representation and introduced, within the present works, the female figure as a central element – a personal reflection of the mother, the woman, and the artist Ioana Tocoaie. The body is represented in a metamorphosed manner, appearing to merge with animals and plants, themselves introduced with the intention of emphasizing ideas of femininity and protectiveness. Through these metamorphoses, I attempt to create a connection to the capacity for survival through transformation and to reject a binary model of identity.

Art for me means… a form of detachment from the everyday, a space in which reality can be suspended and reconstructed through imagination. As an artist, painting becomes a way of accessing instinctive and subconscious areas that are difficult to translate into language. As a viewer, encountering an artwork requires a moment of inner stillness and a suspension of immediate explanation. I feel that an image should be experienced before it is interpreted, and that the subconscious must remain open and unburdened in order for the visual experience to exist authentically. If I had been asked a few years ago, I would have answered without hesitation that the remedy lies in constant work and continuous practice. Now, as a mother, I realize that my time has acquired a different value. The pauses I take from art because of family life are beneficial to me.
The perfect remedy for an inspiration gap is…  awareness and a balance between work, practice, and detachment. Sometimes, it is precisely in the moments when we step away from work that an invisible accumulation takes place, which later feeds the artistic practice. If I had been asked a few years ago, I would have said without hesitation that the only remedy for an artistic impasse is constant work and continuous exercise. Today, with the experience of motherhood, my relationship with time and with the artistic process has changed profoundly. I have come to understand that periods of pause or distance from the studio do not necessarily represent a rupture in practice, but can become part of it. Family life disconnects me from the intense rhythm of artistic production, but at the same time it fills me emotionally and visually with a different kind of experiences and information. And when I return to the studio, I feel a strong accumulation that makes the process much more intense.

About BDF Young… is complemented by a visual research of the contemporary art scene, a map of the current creative ecosystem, which talks about galleries, residencies, artists and collectors, and by a distinctive scenographic component: domestic spaces (living room, office, dining room) recreated together with architects, in which the artists’ works are integrated into contemporary arrangements, alongside furniture pieces signed by Romanian designers.

The artists: Ovidiu Toader, Albert Kaan, Alexandru Ranga (read here an interview with the artist), Anca Vintilă Dragu, Otilia Efros, Daniel Roşca, Andrei Nuțu, Ioana Tocoaie, Nicoleta Mureş, Ştefan Curelici, Tania Şimonca, Norica Popescu (read here an interview with the artist), Denise Lobonț, Nadina Stoica, Hunor Tóth, Lera Kelemen, Fernando Diaconu, Diana Baltag, Bogdan Matei, Irina Motroc, Livia Fălcaru, Diana Grigore (DAIA), Emanuela Balint și Mihai Popescu. Curator: Diana Ursan.