A mixed media work that incorporates actual sand from a Black Sea beach into the painted surface, so the coastal subject is present as material as well as image. The sand is embedded in the gesso layer, then painted over with acrylic washes in the grey-blues of the coastal palette.
The boundary between the areas that contain sand and those that do not corresponds to the implied shoreline in the composition, so the material division coincides with the pictorial one. The work can be read as an abstract landscape or as an abstract painting that happens to contain coastal material.
About the artist
Mihaela Lungu's paintings reduce the pictorial proposition to its minimum viable expression — a single colour field with one compositional decision, a texture repeated until its variation becomes the subject, a boundary between two colour zones held with the discipline of someone who has considered every alternative. What looks effortless is the result of a practice built around the deliberate elimination of the unnecessary.
She studied in Bucharest and at the Royal College of Art in London, where she encountered the British minimalist tradition that remains a significant reference. Her realist works exist in counterpoint to the minimalist practice, made from still life arrangements in the studio. She does not accept commissions.
