At the Court

My name is Mihai Cotiga, born in Turnu Magurele, Romania. Living in Bucharest, Romania, where I have my painting studio. My paintings can be found in private collections in many countries like USA, France, UAE, Canada, Romania. Over the years I had exibited in solo shows and group shows in Romania and Netherlands. Since 2009 I've been paintings in oils and experimenting with various materials. Most of my work untill 2018 it's abstract. I explored and studied abstract expressionism, different types of colours and surfaces, oil paints, enamels, spray paints, oxides, canvas, paper, cloths and so on. I always painted to answer questions and to evoke emotion.

The search remained constant, I am always looking for emotion, mystery and answers to existential questions by exploring achetypal structures. I use what is
closest to me, daily interactions, travels, things that interest me like architecture and our relationship with it and the space it creates, history, mostly its darker moments, catching people in a certain state etc.

I take many photos everywhere I go, digital and film, they are a big part of the process that precedes painting. The images are a visual atlas of things that I see
daily. I sort these photos, I edit them and then sort them again so some of them become future works.

The result is the creation of some beautiful images from something that is part of a collective imagistic vocabulary. For example a block of flats from Bucharest, a
church from Guernica or Notre Dame of Paris. The block of flats from the work is a consequence of communism presents our relationship with urban contemporary
space, the church in Bilbao was bombed in 1937 and Notre-Dame was caught with a fence in front because it burned in 2019, I saw this as a potential death of
european culture or at least a mild heart attack.

I use architecture and space as a result of the faculty I followed and because it influences very much our physiology and our psychology operating in the world. I
chose to express my ideas through painting because I feel the need to do this and it gives me huge freedom of expression.

I have an MFA in Architecture, create illustrations, catalogues, portfolios, posters and lots of other things, mostly creative related for a lot of years.