Teodora Axente (born 1984, Sibiu) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she received a MFA and a PhD at the University of Art and Design. Her works features human figures dressed in sumptuous clothes and surrounded in a melancholic and meditative, often disturbing, atmosphere. Interested in Flemish painting, the Baroque and the Renaissance, as well as clothing design and theatre, Axente creates surreal and oniric images, where different elements coexist on the canvas in a suspended time. Working with oil paint on canvas or on wood, the artist favours a palette of dark and mysterious tones to depict the condition of the individual within contemporary society.

Alexander Tinei (born in 1967 in Caushani, Moldova) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. Known for his striking portraits of young subjects derived from magazines, photographs, and life sittings with friends, over the past years Tinei has become increasingly concerned with the phenomenon of instant global visibility and the exposure of people's formerly private moments on the Internet. Using his painterly style to stage and submerge these 'icons' of cyberspace within the traditional context of portraiture, Tinei has created a series of unnerving depictions situated between reality and fiction. The sense that many people today inhabit an 'other world' online in parallel to their ordinary 'real' lives is conveyed by Tinei's treatment of his figures. Their skin is almost ethereal as if not fully human, and he plays with the idea of private and public facades through masks and disguises. In a way, Tinei is playing with fiction and inventing stories that re-connect him with the inspirations of his youth.

Sergiu Toma (born 1987, Baia-Mare, Romania) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He belongs to a younger generation of Fabrica Pensule in Cluj-Napoca, whose style is characterized by a dark, gloomy palette and a loose application of paint. Toma’s research moves from the micro-universe of his homely environment aiming to explore new uncharted territories. Inspired by Renaissance and Baroque aesthetics, Toma mixes his childhood and nostalgic reminiscences of his past with ancient painting techniques and references dating back to the XVII century, producing then a surrealist reality with illogical and startling effects. The result is an eclectic assemblage where the traditional Romanian interiors turn into a new metaphysical landscape.

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