| VLAD NANCĂ | Exhibition 2025 | |
| Exhibition 2018 |
Vlad Nancă (b. 1979, Bucharest) studied at the Department of Photography and Moving Image at the National University of Arts, Bucharest. His early work marked a fresh artistic perspective by employing DIY methods of production and self-organisation, and played a key role in consolidating the young artist community in Bucharest.
In his early works, Nancă used political and cultural symbols to explore nostalgia and the transformations of society, against the backdrop of Romania and Eastern Europe’s recent history and the rise of aggressive capitalism in the early 2000s. Works such as Original Adidas (2003), I don’t know what Union I want to belong to anymore (2003), and Proposal for the National Redemption Cathedral (2004) remain iconic representations of this period in his practice.
In recent years, Nancă has increasingly focused on space in its various forms – ranging from public space and architecture to outer space – consistently drawing on archival material and references from art and architectural history to create sculptures and installations. His exhibitions From the White Square to the White Cube (Alert Studio, 2015) and Vis a Vis (Suprainfinit Gallery, 2019) explored the intersections between the visionary ideals of radical Italian architecture collectives like Superstudio and the realities of 1980s socialist Romania.
A similar speculative and retrospective approach is reflected in Souvenirs from Earth (Calina Gallery, 2015), which asked what cultural heritage one might carry on a fictional relocation to a planet like Kepler 452b. In the Natural Landscape the Human is an Intruder (Sabot Gallery, 2018) marked a deepening interest in architecture and architectural drawing. Subsequent solo shows – The City and the City (Kunstverein Ost, 2009), A Map of the World as Seen by Him (Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia, 2022), and Corps Orbite (Grotto Gallery, 2024) – revisit 20th-century modernism to imagine possible futures in response to contemporary conditions.
In 2025, Nancă presented Human Scale in the Romanian Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, a collaborative project developed with Muromuro Studio (Ioana Chifu and Onar Stănescu) and curator Cosmina Goagea. Human Scale reframes architectural drawing as a mode of “collective intelligence,” underlining the centrality of the human figure in the discourse on 20th-century architecture and its relevance for spatial justice and future adaptation
Since 2003 Vlad Nancă has exhibited in personal end collective exhibitions at European museums and institutions (Vienna, Bucharest, Brussels, Berlin, Lyon, Luxembourg, Warsaw, Belgrade, Prague, Trento, Bergamo, Bolzano, Cluj Napoca, Sibiu).
