Breaking Fast

Poem Gallery, with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) and the Romanian Embassy in France, and in partnership with Ibrik Kitchen and LiRE, is pleased to present Breaking Fast, its debut exhibition featuring six contemporary Romanian artists. Breaking Fast attempts to navigate our relationship to our identity through food, faith, and a nostalgia that binds us to our roots. How do we persuade ourselves to accept an identity through the food, the rituals, the everyday objects, and the longing we collectively share when we leave a place behind? Does the nostalgia betray us? Are the lies valuable, or are they holding us back? Food is vital to life, and its primary role is nourishment — but what happens when it starts being used to manipulate us, through how we prepare it, how we serve it, what we associate with it? Faith asks whether teachings of love and charity lose their significance in a society that has been systematically abused. And identity asks how we can know who we are without understanding what we, as Romanians, expats, and beyond, are experiencing right now. Artists featured: Christian Paraschiv - one of Romania's most internationally recognized contemporary artists, based in Paris since 1986; pioneer of a bio-art practice using his own cells to create artificial skin, exhibited at Centre Pompidou and MNAC Bucharest. Lucian Pruna - hyperrealist painter capturing 90s nostalgia in post-communist Eastern Europe through meticulous still lifes of humble Romanian foods and objects. Raluca Bararu - multidisciplinary artist exploring identity, ritual, and "aesthetic spookiness" across illustration, watercolor, oil, and ceramics. Elena Preda - transforms domestic rituals, culinary customs, and media imagery into critiques on modern existence. Daniel Stancu - works across iconography, painting, sculpture, and performance, searching for the divine in increasingly secular spaces. Emil Cristian Ghita - sculptor who transforms everyday objects through industrial materials, elevating the mundane into cultural commentary. This is Poem Gallery's inaugural exhibition, bringing together artists discovered through LiRE Bucharest's monthly artist dinners alongside established figures Christian Paraschiv and Lucian Pruna — part of a broader moment reclaiming Romanian representation in Western Europe.