Animals as a mirror for humans.
Adrian Preda was born in 1985 in Bucharest. He attended the Nicolae Tonitza Fine Arts High School and studied graphic arts at the National University of Arts in Bucharest (UNArte), graduating in 2008 after part of his studies at the University of the Arts in Poznań, with an MA in 2010. In 2023 he completed his doctorate at the same university with a thesis titled “Subiectul animal” (The Animal Subject), on the representation of animals in painting. He has exhibited since 2009. His work explores the relationship between humans and other species: animals act as a mirror for human problems, from consumption and power to ecological collapse and expansion into space.
Preda works in painting (acrylic and oil on canvas), drawing (pencil and pastel on black paper) and objects. His compositions are built from found images and his own photographs, assembled digitally, projected to scale and painted realistically in artificial colours. In “Fashion Prey” (2009–2010) animals carry brand logos on their fur; in “Golf Club” golfers are interrupted by animals in their own habitat; “Drift” (2010) centres on polar bears. “Public Transport” and “Rise” followed, the latter placing well-known monuments in a flooded, post-apocalyptic world. Since 2015 he has been working on the “Space Series”, in which images of the cosmos become a critique of exploitation and of science put to the service of profit.
The first exhibition of the space series, “On Heavenly Bodies”, was held at H’art Appendix in 2015, followed by a solo exhibition at H’art Gallery in 2020. At MARe (Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest) he took part in “Arta și orașul 1974–2021” (Art and the City, 2021–2022) and “Monstrul, pătratul și hohotul” (The Monster, the Square and the Roar, 2024–2025). In 2025 the “Space Series” project, co-funded by AFCN (National Cultural Fund Administration), produced two solo exhibitions curated by Ioana Marinescu and Weronika Kobylińska: “Asteroids and Exoglyphs” at Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii (Archeology of Photography Foundation), Warsaw, and “Size and Scale” at SATELIT, Dimitrie Leonida National Technical Museum, Bucharest. His work has been discussed in an extended interview in Scena9 (2024) and in an essay by Mihaela Cîrjan in Revista Arta (2025).
He has worked with H’art Gallery since 2009. The gallery organised his solo exhibitions in 2015 and 2020 and was a partner of “Size and Scale”.
Enquire about works
