Background
Prevenda was born in a Romanian family, who suffered the persecution of the communist regime.
Bucharest
Florica Prevenda
Florica Prevenda work 2 Anonymous 2018
Florica Prevenda work 3 "Anonymous" 2018
Florica Prevenda work 4 "Anonymous" 2018
Florica Prevenda work 5 "Anonymous" 2018
Florica Prevenda work 5 "Anonymous" 2018
Florica Prevenda work 7 Anonymous 2018
(«Globalisation offers advantages to a plural, democratic ...)
«Globalisation offers advantages to a plural, democratic “transparent society” (Gianni Vattino), but it also provides the conditions for the present form of alienation. Behaviour alike, determined by signals from the media – manipulation of reactions. Uniformisation. Fascination of the internet. People caught in a global net. NetPeople.» Adrian Guta
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/net-people
(«..Searching for the Human, the artist goes deeper and de...)
«..Searching for the Human, the artist goes deeper and deeper and reveals to us her character(s)’ stratified structures. Windows/screens are opened inside them; intimately connected with the interior strata of these impersonal bodies there are signs of the media, numbers, letters, words, camera captured memories, even a kind of “mise en abime” of structures, by using printed images of previously created ones introduced in present works. On the other hand , we notice the personages’ movements, sometimes almost tragical, their arms wide open, their fingers too, as trying hard to reach other hands and fingers, exploring the outside world, wanting to grasp reality.»
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/shadows-present
(«I was convinced that I could recreate the past only by u...)
«I was convinced that I could recreate the past only by using the approach "reasonable not-reasonable", thus revealing and making relive all these "me" passed, all these feelings and perceptions protected by the lapse of memory, in the attempt to find the me-fragmented in dissolution which could exist only by its reconstitution.» Florica Prevenda
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/time-regained
(Taking classical forms by combining mythology and fiction...)
Taking classical forms by combining mythology and fiction, combining painting and assemblage, creating a dialogue between narrative, abstraction, materials and composite where each of them, contribute to transformation in freedom iteration of gesture, to fluids infant bodies. The format responds to the formless, dissolving and assimilating contradictions, while extending the metaphor of visual language along material and semiotic lines.
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/serenity
(The end of the second millennium and the beginning of the...)
The end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third millennium were marked by an unprecedented explosion of the era of information, fundamentally shifting how we communicate. Through its forms and means has led to the democratization of information that becomes instant, free, border-less, globalized. Facebook is redefining how and what we communicate. We create and are part of an on-line social network in which the protagonists are 'friends' but may not know each other, freely provide an array of details and images from our private lives but do not meet each other. Social loneliness in a virtual community where the identity disappears behind pervasive schemes. These are the product of endless human change capacity and if they exist, they were necessary.
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/facebook-obsession
(2015 - 2016 «'Efemer' is a reflection on relativity and e...)
2015 - 2016 «'Efemer' is a reflection on relativity and ephemerality in a networked world, at a time when digital technologies and speed of communication make the contemporary person to almost stop questioning the ubiquitous presentations of reality, when excessive consumption of information and lack of a minimum value control lead to an instant obsolescence and information
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/ephemeral-condensation
(Installation (work in progess) 2017-2018 «It is about how...)
Installation (work in progess) 2017-2018 «It is about how people do not see anything around because they keep their eyes on the phone, on the street, in the subway, in museums, in the car, at the restaurant, in holiday. It is as their lives take place, expand only in the virtual worlds, while they are anonymous in the real life, life unfolds in virtual space. We are heading
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/anonymous
("The Face without a Face" might be the shadow, the double...)
"The Face without a Face" might be the shadow, the double, the interior with facets and variants; indefinite, cryptic, archetypal, physiognomically un-individualized but pictorially individualized alter ego reverberating emotions. The rich, contradictory expérience intérieure revolves around this exclusive, redundant, obsessive motif. "The Face without a Face" are imprints, emotional grafts, "improvisations" in a musical and Kandinskyan way, sensors of intense feelings: serene, somber, funereal, distressed, subtle, evanescent, febrile, optimistic, tonic (rarely), playful, pathetic, sad, calm, moody...»
http://www.floricaprevenda.com/content/faces-without-face
Prevenda was born in a Romanian family, who suffered the persecution of the communist regime.
Florica Prevenda is one of the most innovative artists within Romanian contemporary art space. An introspective spirit, the artist develops an intense studio artwork drawing attention particularly through a rich experience of conceptual and artistic challenge and self-discovery. Her artistic and intellectual investigations at the intersection of existing and emerging themes to interpret and critique the world of images are being explored through a series of experimental innovative mixed-media projects in her exhibitions.
From the fundamental theme of the Face (The National Art Museum, 1999) until the anonymous multitude of the silhouettes of the Metropolis (The Shadows of the Present, Simeza, 2004), the painter meditates (approaching the face schematically and in series) on the entire magma of emotions and anxieties that haunt the human condition nowadays, evolving towards the depersonalization of all the nets and towards the consumer reification. This existentialist pithy message is embodied in Florica’s painting exactly in the rind, the leather, the scales, the scars, the imprints, and the crust of the tones of white, grey, black and ochre of the wrapping cardboard. Her images do not become simpler from a cycle to another. They become poli-matters reliefs, with cassetons, with the zigzag rhythms of the goffered cardboard, with fields of numbers with schematized eyes and palms, with interweavings and garlands of paper bands or painted cloth. Therefore, the artist neither performs in narrative scripts nor composes the after-effects of the rhetoric of the proper abstract image.
Prevenda composes, or more precisely she lays down visual-tactile matter, like the ashes of her feelings, over simple urban signs of human presence. The processes of growing of the images and of the matters they wear, the densification of the surfaces - symbolically speaking - build for the artist a niche of introspection. It’s a painting of emotional combustion, serious in inventiveness, without falling into the ludic. The technique of the artist produces an extremely rich pictural texture without intentionally recovering the ridiculous. Prevenda manufactures bricklaying matters and materials without exalting the poverist non-finite. As the musical form close to her painting seems to be an ample organ toccata.
Prevenda’s great picto-objectural suites assert, invoking paradoxically exactly the shadow of the human, the withdrawal of the artist from the mundane, and the passionate abnegation in the material elaboration of the pictorial body and of its stratified density.
Hers assemblage-painting bears a strong presence, striking on a visual and tactile level. With an iconography evolving around the human face and shape, varying between anonymous and autobiographical representations, the artist reiterates contemporary art’s main issues: the complex relations between 2D and 3D representation, the physical, hand-operated character of her artistic act versus the almost “industrial” use of technology in other delegated artistic processes, etc. Overall, her work emerges in conceptual series that symbolically address the multi-layered connections between the self/individual and the others/society, between real and virtual identity, in the accelerated, chaotic context of technologically–mediated, globalizing and “democratic” communication.
Florica Prevenda is a presence that stands out in Romanian contemporary art: trained as a painter before 1989, active in the artistic educational system, from an early stage in her career she directed her efforts towards the international art scene, without forsaking the local one.
Florica Prevenda has a substantial oeuvre, randomly known in Romania, but distinctive through the specific features of her artistic practice – mainly developed towards transgressing the art of painting[, using collage and assemblage of unconventional materials, with an iconography evolving around the human face and shape, varying between anonymous and autobiographical representations - supported by her impeccable professional discipline. With a strong presence, striking on a visual and tactile level, the assemblage-painting practiced by the artist reiterates contemporary art’s main issues: the complex relations between 2D and 3D, the mentality of the artistic act versus working in conceptual series that symbolically address the multi-layered connexions between the self/individual and the others/society, between real and virtual identity, in the accelerated, chaotic context of technologically–mediated, globalizing and ecstatic communication.
Resonating with the transformations that painting had suffered in the 80s, Florica Prevenda liberated herself from the figurative and started working with the color on large surfaces. In the 90s she transcended the abstract gestualism through geometrically vibrating plane surfaces as well as through shades of grey and transparencies. Towards the end of the decade she started developing the anthropomorphous theme in hundreds of portraits (The Faceless Face) exhibited in 1999 at the National Art Museum. The following series of works—Net People (2000-2001) and Shadows of the Present (2001-2004)— problematized the identity of the individual in the contemporary context, the artist is interested in the way in which the new technologies affect the life of people. The numerical codes, the pixelization, the screens, the theme of the shadow suggested the sketched body more and more fragile and fascinated with the virtual world. On the other hand, the theme of the hybridization of the biological and the technology allowed the artist to “create a body” for the work of art, continuing a process that she had started in 1990 when she had switched from oil and acrylics to other materials (nails, wire, cardboard, textile, plastic, sawdust, etc.) in order to produce collage, assemblage and, in the end, sculpture. The series Time Regained (2005-2008) was announced as an assumed exploration of the self. The human body remained a framework of the artistic works but this time Florica Prevenda staged her own body—deconstructed, broken up, understood as a phantasmatic construct connected not only to experiences but also to dreams, expectations, frustrations, wishes. The series Serenity (2009-2010) is the only one in which the artist does not destroy the body but presents it as a total through the outline of the body of a generic child, a beautiful form that is nevertheless empty like a blank page on which life experiences are going to be registered. Facebook Obsession (2011-2015), Ephemeral/Condensation (2015-2016), and Anonymous (2017-2018) are series that problematize the success of the networks of socialization as well as the need for communication and self-representation of contemporary human beings. The impoverishment of identity caused by the new technologies is suggested by sketchy physiognomies to which color sometimes adds a touch of coquetry and frivolity. In a world in which communication is instantaneous and takes place in a network, the people imprisoned in the image seem to be terminals connected to a central computer which simply cannot establish real communication.
Her series, Facebook Obsession, coherently inserts into the artist’s past endeavor, always expressing a form-meaning unity: from the central theme of the face in the Faces without a Face series, 1999, extended on a relational level with Net People, 2001, to the connections between time and the human being in Shadows of the Present, 2004, or Time Regained, 2008. While we travel forth in time through Florica Prevenda’s creation, the visual signs gradually leave the pictorial surface, the matter multiplies in relief and the resulting visible network supports lucid visions of the present psycho-social context. In Facebook Obsession, human faces and shapes built from overlapping unities and material elements are represented alongside the well-known trademarks of the most successful XXIst century social network. Although the title may evoke negative connotations, Prevenda practices a detached “look” upon the contemporary exploded phenomenon of communication, accepting its occurrence, dissemination, and growth as inevitable consequences of the human mind’s creativity and resourcefulness.
Her works have been presented at different locations in Romania and abroad: Hangar Art Center, Brussels (2019), Romanian Cultural Institute, Vienna (2016), Annart Gallery, Bucharest (2016), Arielle d'Hauterives Gallery, Brussels (2016), National Museum of Art, Chisinau (2016), Timisoara Art Museum (2014), Brukenthal National Museum (2017, 2013), AnnArt Gallery (2014), Arthus Gallery, Brussels (1999, 2001, 2004, 2011); National Museum of Art / Contemporary Art, Bucharest (1999); Galerie Het Dijkstoelhuis, Wageningen, Holland (2002, 2004); Mogosoaia Museum, Romania (2017–18, 2008); Galerie Lamber, Valkenswaard, Holland (2000); FNV Kiem, Amsterdam (2002); M.I.A. “One Woman Show”, Milano, Italy (2007); Galeria Simeza, Bucharest (2004).
(«Globalisation offers advantages to a plural, democratic ...)
(«..Searching for the Human, the artist goes deeper and de...)
(«I was convinced that I could recreate the past only by u...)
(Taking classical forms by combining mythology and fiction...)
(The end of the second millennium and the beginning of the...)
(2015 - 2016 «'Efemer' is a reflection on relativity and e...)
(Installation (work in progess) 2017-2018 «It is about how...)
("The Face without a Face" might be the shadow, the double...)
Corneliu Antim
“Time Regained seems to me the happiest plastic accomplishment of the exaltation of the Self from the entire creation of the artist. It is an unfettering of energies and of mental, sensorial and emotional accumulations that the artist incorporated, through her positive germs, to the new order that she herself establishes.”
Ruxandra Balaci
“Feeding on abstract and informal expressionism, Florica Prevenda’s painting re-problematizes on two surprisingly separate disjoined registers: one rather figurative and lyrical and the other abstractive in a temperate way. Both revolve round a unique motif: the silhouette, the outline of a humanoid face, The Faceless Face (let’s call it this way even if it bears no name), a mask of the Self, of the inner infinitely multipliable ego.”
Adrian Guţă
“The signs that render Florica Prevenda’s discourse unique (registered both along Apollonian and Dionysian coordinates) are the state of mind and the structure. The serialization of some elements creates rhythms, while the monumental sense in the parcelling out of the fields of plastic matter is in harmony with the Baroque features of the details. The sight and the tactile sense of the receptor are equally alerted. Resorting with echo to the palimpsest effect, the artist stimulates thinking about the topic of a sort of “archaeology of the human contemporary typology.”
Aurelia Mocanu
“For two decades and a half Florica Prevenda has shown an exemplary tenacity of the pictorial and material research on a problematic which gets deeper and deeper from one exhibition to the other in terms of procedure and conceptual level. The main theme of The Faceless Face (NAMR, 1999) inclines towards the diagram of the crowd of the metropolis (Shadows of the Present, Simeza, 2004) towards the multipled Self (Time Regained, Mogoșoaia Palace, 2008) or towards digital identity (Facebook, 2013-2016, Brukenthal Museum, AnnArt Gallery in Bucharest, the Art Museum in Timișoara, the Art Museum in Chișinău). Together with other two great feminine names of the Romanian contemporary painting—Paula Ribariu and Ioana Batranu—Prevenda is a model of tenacity in her plastic research regarding the ‘humanist” problems which organically develop from one exhibition-cycle to the other.”
Petre Tănăsoaica
“Is man a foreigner in the world of the new informational technologies? Yes and no but especially no because he never loses the features of humanity especially because the artist uses drawing as a form of neutralizing individual particularities and thus obtains the contrary, that is his mystery.”
Alexandra Titu: “The type of informal practised by Florica Prevenda has another motive than the need to deconstruct language, conventions, the very image of the real to which her painting stays connected through the degree of concrete inherent in any emphasis laid on the interest for matter and especially by the placement of the initial moment of the creative state in the perceptive zone.”
Diana Ursan
“Only rarely, by completely leaving the vertical surface and its frame, do Florica Prevenda’s paintings-assemblages impose a powerful physical presence which has an impact both at visual and at tactile level. With an iconography that evolves around the human figure and silhouette, around autobiographic and anonymous representations, the works repeat some of the main problematic of contemporary art: the complex relations between bidimensional and tridimensional representation, between concept and handicraft, between the concrete, manual character of her artistic act and the almost industrialized use of technology in the assigned artistic processes. On the whole, the artist’s work develops in thematic series which symbolically treat the multi-layered connections between the Self/individual and the others/society, between real and virtual, in the chaotic and accelerated context of the technologically mediated communication which is both globalized/globalizing and ‘democratic’.”
Quotes from others about the person
Aurelia Mocanu
"Painter Florica Prevenda is a brilliant Romanian example of the plastic fragmentarist research. The artist has a consistent studio problematics which has been developing for a decade with each exhibition. It’s in fact a “plastic” personal form of introspection and of dialogue with the spirit of time. On a figuratively schematic and serial pretext – the one of portrait-silhouette – the artist prospects the magma of emotions and anxieties that haunt the human condition nowadays, tending towards the consumist depersonalization and reification."
Adrian Guta
"Florica Prevenda (the artist belongs to the generation of the 80s) transforms the figurative-abstract dilemma in a fertile dialogue – a proof being the interference of her Shadows. Beyond the ideative nucleus of this personal exhibition on which these comments have been made, the artistic expression of this nucleus remains essential. Florica Prevenda’s creation, deeply personal, simultaneously characterized by sensibility and rigour, is easily welcome in any cultural space. Its value already inscribes it in the international circuit, which is confirmed by the more and more ample presence of her exhibitions on abroad, exhibitions that have a growing success."
Corneliu Antim
"What fascinates in Florica Prevenda’s creation of the last years is the conversion of a great expressive density of the ideatic rustling and of its painful lucidity – attributes characteristic of the perfecting of her maturity – in pictorial perfect gesture with a net, plain energy lacking any ornamental artifices. Everything gets the warning consistency of the symbol. Man himself, as axial character in the plastic composition and philosophy of the artist sums up a spectral entity, dematerialized in a world of multiple alienations. Prevenda feels the imperious need of marking this disintegrating destiny of mankind. Her “shadows” cannot speak. Their corporality is suggested only by rather standardized contours, schematized in gestures, cold in attitudes and brutally excluded by centrifugation from the circles of communication. The artist introduces in this plastic construction different materialities variedly structured, fixed like some targets on a shooting range.
The suggestion of maximum depersonalization is amplified by the colour dominants – black and white- with the entire scale of greys between these two poles of radicalized light. We notice the sign of an intentional exaltation of the dull, dramatic dimension of human destiny, more and more felt by the contemporary world that the artist obsessively perceives like a wound always open."
Married
