Magdalena Pelmuș Romanian, b. 1974

Magdalena Pelmuș (b. 1974, Constanța) lives and works in Bucharest, a graduate in painting at the Faculty of the Arts, Nicolae Grigorescu University of the Arts, currently the National University of the Arts, Bucharest, in 1999. The artist was awarded the 2000 Visual Artists' Union grant for young artists, co-founded the SURSA group, in 1999, and the artist run space Loading OPEN Lab in 2006.

Magdalena Pelmuș's works have covered broad themes to do with feminism, domestic violence, and globalism from the point of view of an artist in the Eastern Block. She contributed to reestablishing women artists in the Romanian contemporary art scene of the 2000s. Pelmuș explores the universe of the human body, the complex interwovenness of the circulatory system, anatomy, and human psychology with the same drive.

The artist takes on a surprising and liberating mixture of techniques and media, adding textile art, jewelry design, objet trouvé, and pop culture to drawing and painting. Magdalena collaborates with Bogdan Pelmuș on various shared projects, contrasting with one another on the art scene, among various groups and artist run spaces, experimenting with performance, happening, and installation.

Magdalena Pelmuș has established her own visual language over the course of her career, standing nobly among sharp contrasts, the radical closeness between the symbolism of violence and poetic emotion, between pain and joy, and her works have a meditative and enchanting dimension.