Wanda Mihuleac - Anomalie

Curated by Ruxandra Demetrescu, the exhibition traces a transversal journey through several decades of Wanda Mihuleac's artistic practice. It brings together works on paper—including drawings and prints that recall the artist's background in graphic arts—in a compelling dialogue with photography, collage, and, not least, three-dimensional objects and installations. Through varied, inventive, and technically sophisticated experiments, Wanda Mihuleac articulates a singular artistic vision that questions the limits of language, the relationship between body and memory, and forms of sensory otherness. Situated at the intersection of disciplines and cultures, her work offers a contemporary reinterpretation of fundamental artistic concerns: perception, transmission, and the reinvention of sensory experience.

The exhibition's title, "Anomalie" (identical in both Romanian and French), represents far more than a recurring theme in Wanda Mihuleac's artistic practice. As the artist explains:

"In a world saturated with norms, reproducible models, and calibrated images, anomaly emerges as a crack—not to destroy, but to reveal. From a Deleuzian perspective, anomaly may be understood as a line of flight, a vector of deterritorialization that cuts across established forms and opens them to unpredictable becomings. Anomaly thus becomes an operator of differentiation: it does not oppose the norm but exceeds it, destabilizes it, and renders it inoperative. Far from being a mere deviation, anomaly constitutes an ontological breach in the order of reality. It is the moment when the presumed coherence of the world fractures, allowing the possibility of a double, a repetition, or an irreducible deviation to emerge."

Viewed from this perspective, Wanda Mihuleac's work can be understood as a challenge to the regime of visibility itself. Her works embrace the notion of the critical image, as formulated by the French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman: "an image in crisis, one that critiques the image itself, capable of triggering a response and producing theoretical efficacy; an image that questions our way of seeing so that, when it looks back at us, it compels us to truly see it."

The exhibition forms part of a broader curatorial project conceived in tandem with Sensory Democracy, presented at the Craiova Art Museum. That exhibition brings together works across a wide range of media—including painting, installation, video art, filmed performances, and artist's books—in an ambitious exploration of the role of the senses in artistic experience.

Wanda Mihuleac (b. 1946, Bucharest) is a visual artist working across installation, performance, and the artist's book. She has lived in Paris since 1988. A graduate of the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, she is regarded as one of the leading figures of Romanian and European conceptual and experimental art.

She has received numerous awards at international biennials in Italy, Poland, Croatia, and France, as well as distinctions in both Romania and France. Since 1973, she has presented 28 solo exhibitions in galleries across Paris, Marseille, Taverny, Clichy, Levallois-Perret, Strasbourg, Bucharest, Timișoara, Athens, Tokyo, New York, Geneva, Rome, Venice, Milan, Aachen, Saint-Étienne, La Marsa (Tunisia), and Liège.

Over the course of an international career spanning more than five decades, Mihuleac has exhibited at prestigious institutions including the Centre Pompidou, the Grand Palais, and the Venice Biennale. Her works are held in public and museum collections internationally. She is also the founder of the Paris-based publishing house Transignum and is widely recognised for interdisciplinary projects that bring visual art into dialogue with literature, philosophy, and contemporary forms of artistic expression.