Marieta Chirulescu’s work has a distinct abstract pictorial language that references the formalism of Colour Field painting, yet with a spare palette, superimposes an array of reproductive and digital printing techniques. Drawing from an extensive archive of imagery, Chirulescu repeatedly scans from images that range from her own photographs to those taken by her father during the Romanian dictatorship, and through to computer screen-shots or technical irregularities that occur throughout the scanning processes. Central to Chirulescu’s work is the idea of re-occurrence which is present in the series of portrait format paintings with their multiple borders or deviant margins. This can also be seen in a triptych which conveys geometric two-tone dimensionality that bellows and buckles, each time interrupting the rigidity of the composition with a single splinter of light cutting across it. Chirulescu intuitively excavates the abstract surface within her paintings creating what has been described by Adam Szymczyk as ‘afterimages’ or ‘reflections of the mechanical unconscious’.

Marieta Chirulescu was born in Sibiu, Romania in 1974. She lives and works in Berlin.