A traveller and a keen observer, Alex Bodea transfers her study of daily life – and the politics of its discontents and little joys – onto paper in visual narratives. Her images transition fluidly across genres and art historical eras, from the sequential storytelling of her sharp black-and-white graphic novels to a painting style that references nineteenth- and twentieth-century cartoons or the whimsical theatricality of eighteenth-century Rococo. She engages with the latter in her newest paintings. Here, Bodea appropriates a style practiced prior to the French Revolution and associated with a privileged class that was, at the time, unaware of its imminent abolition. Seemingly antiquated relative to contemporary paintings practices, Bodea’s symbiotic compositions of bodies in undress – dancing or piling on top of each other in fragmentary fantasy architectures – nevertheless evoke an atmosphere of insurrection – and resurrection. Organized asymmetrically and skin-to-skin, and sometimes just as silhouettes that merge with their backgrounds, these figures’ interactions produce what the artist calls a non-hierarchical dynamism.
As with most of Bodea’s work, her approach to contemporary subject matter is oblique and refined. Her social commentary is presented through a veil of charm, humour, and flamboyance as devices intended to heighten the pleasure of looking. Adding to this effect, is Bodea’s use of self-made colours from natural, rare pigments and binding agents. Similarly, her appropriation and subversion of an art-historical style once considered decadent and “effeminate”, but arguably one with a higher number of well-known female practitioners than other comparable eras, reinforces her sensory approach. Underlying Bodea’s aesthetic and historical concerns is a queer visual strategy that aims to make visible the adversities faced by the socially disadvantaged and the dispossessed, while also reclaiming celebration and healing.
A far cry from the fancifully dressed aristocrats of historical Rococo paintings, and naked as most of Bodea’s figures are, they become the actors in an egalitarian projection – a play that demands collective joining in a full cast rehearsal.
Alex Bodea (born 1981 in Cluj, Romania, she/her) merges visual art and storytelling. Driven by the desire to be an observer to the human experience, she documents and interprets various multicultural landscapes encountered along her journey as a nomad-artist and queer person. Among her most recent exhibitions: Plan B Foundation (collective show, Cluj, upcoming 2026), SOLO (solo show, That place called abundance, Bucharest, 2025), Kuntshalle Bega (collective show, Land of fire, 2024/2025), Galeria Lutnița (solo show, Chișinău, 2024). Currently, she is a participant in the BPA// Berlin program for artists (2026/27). Bodea is the author of the graphic novel Six Breakfast, One Lunch (artist book, 2016), the visual notes album The Man with a hole in his tie (published with the support of ENSA-Galerie La Box, 2020), and the graphic novel The Fact Finder (BeccoGiallo Edizioni, 2020).
18.3.2026, 6 PM
Closing of the exhibition & informal conversation with the artist on the intersections and differences between her paintings and graphic novels, as well as her use of natural pigments, sequential storytelling, Rococo influences, nomadism, bodies in movement, social commentary, and visual pleasure as a queer artistic approach.
