Andreea Grigoraș, born in Romania in 2000, holds both a BA and an MA from the Department of Sculpture at the University of Art and Design of Cluj-Napoca, where she currently lives and works. Her practice takes the body as a site where personal experience and cultural norms meet, overlap and come into conflict. Sexuality, desire and intimacy appear not as isolated private themes, but as experiences continually shaped by social expectations.
Grigoraș is interested in the systems that assign meaning, value and boundaries to bodies and objects. Through substitution and material transformation, she takes familiar forms out of their expected roles. An ordinary object can lose its practical function and acquire a symbolic charge that was previously less visible. This shift allows humour, discomfort and attraction to operate together, encouraging the viewer to reconsider what the object represents and why that meaning feels culturally familiar.
Her materials include clay, engobe, brass, resin, glitter, beads, thread and readymade elements. The contrast between them is significant. Brass can give permanence and authority to an ambiguous form, while glitter or beads can make a sculptural object playful, seductive or deliberately excessive. Clay retains the trace of touch, and readymade objects carry histories of use that can be redirected through a new context. Works such as Pofta-n cui, Golden D, Golden Rope and Sorcove demonstrate this movement between bodily association, Romanian idiom and transformed function.
Grigoraș’s sculptures and design objects suspend certainty. They can be intimate without becoming confessional, provocative without relying on spectacle, and humorous without losing their critical edge. By changing the material and context of familiar things, she reveals how desire and social regulation are embedded in the objects, expressions and rituals of everyday life.
