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After more than a decade of silence, this blog returns in a renewed form.For many years, it has served mainly as an archive of my major projects — Political Bestiary , Dead Dove , 44 , Infanta  — a structured yet quiet visual journal. On my new website, these projects continue to evolve and expand, finding their place within a broader artistic context: 👉 www.valeriumladin.com Here on the site’s blog, I will begin sharing new fragments from the studio: reflections, working pr

The dove was sent to bring a sign. But it never returned. Or perhaps—it returned differently. It remained, sealed in Light. On black, noetic, tar-like backgrounds, dense as the darkness of the beginning,I paint white doves, fallen. Voiceless witnesses, white gashes in the flesh of the world. They no longer announce deliverance.Sometimes, though, a leaf escapes—like a comma in a cut verse. For they are, still, bearers of Light. These works are a gate— between what once lived a

Over the course of many years, I served as a faculty member at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where I taught drawing, color, and composition. Most of my teaching activity took place within the Photo-Video Department, although in the early years of my career I also taught in the Painting, Design, and Decorative Arts Departments.   This experience was both intense and profoundly formative, not only for the students but also for myself. The daily dialogue with suc

This making-of video documents the creative process of Valeriu Mladin, within his long-term project Political Bestiary — a series of large-scale charcoal drawings started in 2013 and continuing to this day. In this political bestiary, human figures with animal heads become symbolic portraits of power, instinct, and moral ambiguity. Each drawing, patiently layered in charcoal, reveals the tension between clarity and chaos. Filmed in the artist’s studio, the video captures the

The Political Bestiary series continues with new large-scale charcoal drawings on paper (200 x 150 cm). In these works, Valeriu Mladin explores, through hybrid figures – human bodies with animal heads – the mechanisms of power, the distortions of identity, and the grotesque nature of contemporary society. The contrast between the precision of realist drawing and the power of allegory turns each image into a striking scene, where irony and social critique intertwine with a fas

Eight works from the larger Political Bestiary series were showcased during the SHARP Festival, organized by pianist Daniel Ciobanu at the Romanian Athenaeum. The idea was bold: the monumental drawings, with their hybrid figures and striking expressions, infused the neoclassical hall with a sharp contemporary resonance. The encounter between the solemn architecture and today’s critical imagery generated an unexpected dialogue, both surprising and memorable for the audience.

"IT IS TOO MUCH" is an installation that I created and exhibited in 1991 at the Art Museum in Timișoara, Romania. Less than two years had passed since the Romanian Revolution, and the violence of the battles fought to overthrow the communist regime had awakened the population's appetite for shocking images, difficult to look at, which just two years earlier could not have been exhibited. The free press, flooded with "hot" topics, brought to the surface everything society foun

Of Skin and Hides. Political Bestiary III Valeriu Mladin is one of the prominent representatives of Romanian figurative art, a keen observer of the human body, and a teacher who remains forever in the memory of those he has guided. Between the Romanian tradition of the French “school” type, positioned along the axis of classicism–impressionism–lyrical abstraction, and the rigorous, hyperrealist drawing with dense, carnal valuation and unrealistically precise highlights of lig

The art of drawing is the medium that offers Valeriu Mladin unlimited possibilities to create, in a distinct and personal way, a visual and thematic universe whose language has the power to endure beyond historical epochs and geographical boundaries. In the series of ten monumental drawings exhibited under the title Political Bestiary at Galateca Gallery, the artistic discourse—endowed thematically with liminal values—is above all a demonstration of mastery, which places the

The laconic title of the exhibition, 44, carries a major symbolic weight: it refers directly to Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Only a decade before his election, the idea that an African American could reach the highest office in America seemed unimaginable. When Obama became president in 2008, the event transcended politics, acting as a catalyst for change and opening a new horizon of reflection on democratic values and freedom. In the artistic field

TEN YEARS AFTER – NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART OF ROMANIA – BUCHAREST – 1999 In December 1999, a decade after the events of 1989, the National Museum of Art of Romania hosted the exhibition “TEN YEARS AFTER” by Valeriu Mladin. The project included a monumental oil painting on canvas (10 × 3 m), depicting young men killed during the Revolution, shown as heroes with death certificates pinned to their chests, alongside eight “gramineous” sculptures – life-size human bodies made of ger

Valeriu Mladin (birth date and place: May 12, 1958, Lipova, Arad County) – romanian visual artist, University Lecturer at Photo-Video and Computerized Image Processing Department within the National University of Arts in Bucharest. Artistic genres in which he expresses are: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance. Studies and Academic Activity: Institute of Fine Arts ”Ion Andreescu", Cluj-Napoca,1982; Member of the Plastic Artists Union

“The increasingly pronounced transformation of Picasso into a recognizable commodity of mass culture, especially within the society of the information spectacle, becomes an inexhaustible resource for benign-critical statements, such as Valeriu Mladin’s installation Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - The Blue Period, which refers not only to Picasso’s ever more revealed and debated love life (already since the 1990s) – with all its complications and abuses – but also to the growing s

This video represents an attempt to depict what was discovered behind the two photos, selected from a longer series, as will be seen, as well as to reveal how they were taken in the year 2016.   A dull thud was heard one day from one of the 18 windows of my spacious studio, located on the upper floor of the house where I live. Engrossed in work, I hadn't intended to investigate what had happened.   About two weeks later, on a chilly late autumn morning, stepping onto the stud

This large-scale installation was created together with my wife, Carmen Paiu, for the international exhibition “EARTH”, hosted by the Art Museum of Timișoara in 1992, curated by Ileana Pintilie. It was displayed in two rooms without ceilings, doors, or windows, in an unrenovated wing of the museum – located in the very square where people had been killed during the Revolution. The installation, conceived in a ready-made spirit, consisted of 22 life-size human sculptures made

THE POLICE ARE ON OUR SIDE - PERORMANCE - HELIOS GALERY - TIMIŞOARA, 1991 Who Shot at Us? – performance staged at the Helios Gallery in Timișoara, 1991, in the post-revolutionary cultural context, when theaters and exhibition halls stood empty, and the public’s attention was focused entirely on the events of December 1989. Artists Carmen Paiu, Constantin Răducanu, and Valeriu Mladin were brought to the opening in handcuffs, escorted by two police cars with sirens, and delibe

MENGELE'S COLLECTION  - INSTALATION - VENICE BIENALE,  1997 MENGELE'S COLLECTION is a ready-made installation created in three versions, exhibited at the Art Gallery in Sfântu Gheorghe (Romania, 1994), at 134 Gallery in Český Krumlov (Czech Republic, 1994), and at the Venice Biennale (1997). The work combines hundreds of dental casts placed on cardboard pedestals with 100 photographs of human mouths. Although the title alludes to a notorious doctor from history, the installa

INFANTA (2004) is a remake of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita of Austria, conceived as a painting-object in a ready-made technique. The work consists of two canvases, with the figure’s dress constructed from hundreds of empty oil paint tubes, fixed with polyurethane foam. By turning the residues of the artistic process into image, the piece reflects on creation, materiality, and the transformation of painting itself. At its first exhibition, Infanta was immediately noticed by

2020 Lansare „Azur de Lisabona” – album bilingv cu texte semnate de peste 50 de personalități române HotNews AGERPRES Almedina – „Azul de Lisboa / Azur de Lisabona” 2019 „Freatic 3: Îl opun pe A lui 1” – Lumea Credinței Expoziție „Oglindiri” @ Galeria ICR Lisabona (2 sept.) – Modernism.ro Expoziție „Identități vizuale” @ Muzeul de Artă, Piatra Neamț (5 iunie) Artportfolio OnlineGallery Rețeaua Literară YouTube – Teodor Moldovan Ziare.com Expoziție „Bestiar Politic 3” @ Galeri

Attitudes, Habits and Political Grimaces  Notable in Valeriu Mladin’s work is the relationship between subject and image, always inscribed within concise morphological limits. The development of the chosen theme generally presupposes serialization, each part of the whole constituting itself as a variation. The artist conceives his projects da capo al fine, maintaining in his discourse the optimal measure of the narrative from which he departs, regarded as iconographic source.