Diana Popuț Romanian, b. 1994

Diana Popuț (b. 1994, Cluj-Napoca) lives and works between Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest. She completed her undergraduate, master's, and doctoral studies at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca (2013-2022), developing a practice rooted in sculpture, installation, and the slow, material investigation of form and its conditions.

Her formation was shaped by three successive Erasmus residencies: in 2015 at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain, where she developed her first installation, Sine qua non; in 2016 at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where she initiated Finestre, a long-term series that continues to inform her work; and in 2020-2021 at Laurențiu Adrian Craioveanu's studio in Lodi, Italy, where she acquired new sculpture techniques and began working with marble using materials sourced from the alluvial deposits of the Adda River - stone already shaped by forces larger than the artist's hand.

Popuț works with paper, wood, marble, and other primordial materials through repetitive manual gestures - sanding, porating, reducing to essentials - allowing matter to continue its own processes of transformation. The fundamental unit of her thinking is the pore: a condition of relation rather than a form, whose accumulation gives rise to what she calls membranes - permeable structures functioning as active spaces of negotiation between opposites.

The resulting works propose a reflection on autonomy and its limits, suggesting that existence is constituted through continuous relations and adjustments. What we perceive as distinct and stable is always the outcome of ongoing negotiation - a principle Popuț's sculpture makes visible, quietly and precisely, in the surfaces of its materials.