Răzvan Neagoe Romanian, b. 1974

Răzvan Neagoe (b. 1974, Bucharest) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. In 2002, he took a degree in painting from the Faculty of the Arts at the National University of the Arts, Bucharest, in Romania, and a master's degree in visual arts from the same university. Between 1995 and 2005, the artist worked as a founding member of the Ecco group, in 2006, as a founding member of the focAR group, along with Alina Tudor, between 2019 and 2021, he joined the group STUP, and initiated the Suprapuneri photography project in 2022.

Răzvan Neagoe's works have covered a range of recurrent themes over the artist's career, including the workshop, the self-portrait, natural, urban, and industrial landscapes, examining the precarious, traumatized, and confused position of the person deformed by ideology, perception, and social constraints.

Neagoe uses photography as a visual instrument to explore expression and experimentation, focusing on the problems of capturing and losing the ephemeral image. He makes particular use of a camera and photo paper worn down with time, defective, or discontinued, creating a dialogue between traditional photography techniques and technology with subjects and the narration of the present. Neagoe's practice is somehow more like lab tests or dark room research, with a residual component, archival, revealing fragments of the past in the present. 

An image created with no camera, obtained in rudimentary dark room conditions, modified by the effects and defects of chemical substances and out-of-date technology, on film roll or expired paper, on unconventional, super-sized surfaces, are all defining artifices of a process that places Răzvan Neagoe somewhere between a painter's subjectivity and a photographer's objectivity.