Laura Covaci is quite a game-changer in contemporary art. She paints in pixels. She scares people. She delights the connoisseur. She is unfazed by risk. She never stands still.

She was raised in the richly vibrant intellectual circle of the Covaci family, where the troubled generation of (nowadays) iconic poets, painters and actors used to meet for talk and wine and noisy late-night parties and garden ping-pong.

Their stories about time spent in Communist prisons, the recklessness of their new subversive works and the frisson of freedom – all layered themselves in Laura’s formative struc­ture. She studied mural art in the mid 80s and started to paint large-scale, eerie landscapes of solitude and chill. She got to be her generation’s top record holder in an international art auction sale.

The gallery of characters she developed over the years, at home or indeed dur­ing her re-located lives in the United States or France, include equivocal men and women, nude and lonely, sitting on a metal-bar bed or by the side of a swimming-pool, against a crisp hospital landscape; bruised dolls and other left-over toys from silent orphanages; family portraits blitzed by the robot-cousin or the steel-eyed princess, next to the placid Dad and the bald twins.

Ba­roque worlds coming from a high-strung past and an unrelenting future, like there is no escape. In 2011, a new little creature took shape, this time from the im­palpable depths of an iPad exercise: Luna. She is a little girl with spikes instead of hair and a sudden resource for smile and play. This moment opened up a whole new territory for the artist, who was already a master-mixer of fine drawing and brush painting, with collage and pho­to manipulation – listed in the Top 100 Romanian Artists.

She now dived deeper into the digital, modeling and painting on-screen in minute generation of infinite de­tail, like a fractal on a mission to capture Time.  The artist is on a spree of opening and closing door after door, back and forth: an emotionally-moving march into our own transient lives -and of art history. Her achievement in the 3D medium is extraordinary not only per se but because it reveals the creative fountain of technology and its intrinsic resource to produce emotion – in Covaci’s unique compositions which take shape on her digital screen easel through drawing, painting, collage, sculp­ture and architecture.

One can think of the digital art­ist as a re-incarnation of the Renaissance multi-tasker! Laura Covaci’s luxuriant landscapes – where nymphs frolic with tigers, slender-white women wear pearls, metal nails and a golden crab tiara or indeed little girls from sepia photography times peer at us through their outer-space head-gear and play with a shiny high-tech drone – all this whizzes across multiple art history references which lead us from today’s digital artists to the Romantics and the Flemish masters, to Mucha and the Rococo in hybrid surreal and pop-art sweeps. If we scratch the surface of the past, we find future. This is where Laura Covaci’s series of new work belongs. But let’s be brave and enjoy it today.

(Text written by Gabriela Massaci)

Laura Covaci received a BFA in 1982 from the Fine Arts Academy in Bucharest. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries, museums and private collections worldwide, including  Grand Palais / SAGA Paris, Le Musee Imaginarire de l’Espace / Galerie Serge Aboukrat, Benetton Foundation, ING Bank, The European Bank of Developement, Elle Magazine Los Angeles Private Collection. She currently lives and works in Paris and Bucharest.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2015 ”Cruel Fairy Tale / Chapter 3 / Taking-off”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2014 ”Cruel Fairy Tale / Chapter 2 / Luna’s Phases”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2012 ”artZoom Laura Covaci: Cruel Fairy Tale / Chapter I”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2011 ”Cruel Fairy Tale / Chapter I / Orphanage”, Galerie 208 Chicheportiche, Paris, France

2009 ”Bug’s Season”, Galerie 208 Chicheportiche, Paris, France

2008 “Multiverse / Laura Covaci & Catherine Ikam”, Galerie 208 Chicheportiche, Paris, France

2005 ”’Transiter”, G.N.G Galerie d’art, Paris, France

1993 De Markten, Bruxelles, Belgium

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2014 ”Spring artZoom”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2013-2014 ”pencil | ink | indian ink”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2013 ”[en]counterpoint”, Pop-up Gallery The Art of Living, Bucharest, Romania

”Summer artZoom_02”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2012-2013 ”The Small Big Art”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2012 ”Summer artZoom_01”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2011 ”Planning notebook”, AnnArt Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2010 ”Phase Zéro / 96 Propositions Spatiales”, Galerie Serge Aboukrat, Paris

2001 ”Gallery’s Artists”, Trinity Gallery, Atlanta, SUA

1999 “The drawing parlor”, Saint Remy de Provence, France

1993 AJL Galerie, Paris, Franța

1993 Galerie Damien Bouquet, Paris, France

1993 “Saga”, Grand Palais, Paris, France

1992 “International Impact Festival”, Kyoto, Japan

1991 “Erotika”, Budapest, Hungary