Some projects begin from a word, others from an image.
Urma alege began from something older than both: the proverb.
Curated by Ana Daniela Sultana, our solo exhibition at CREART Gallery brought together a visual exploration of Romanian sayings, cultural memory and the quiet wisdom hidden inside everyday language.
Proverbs have always carried a strange kind of force. They are small, familiar phrases, often heard in childhood, repeated by parents, grandparents or neighbours, sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously. They seem simple at first, but inside them live entire ways of seeing the world: humour, fear, survival, tenderness, contradiction, morality and imagination.
For this exhibition, we returned to these sayings not as fixed lessons, but as living images.
We kept returning to one question:
What remains inside a proverb once we begin to see it, not only hear it?
Urma alege became a journey through Romanian collective imagination, where familiar expressions were translated into visual scenes, symbolic figures and poetic compositions.
Proverb, Memory and Image
At Atelier Ars Ana, storytelling remains at the centre of everything we create, whether we work with illustration, ceramics, painting or objects.
Romanian proverbs have been part of our visual language for many years. They carry something deeply rooted, but also wonderfully strange. Many of them are full of animals, impossible gestures, domestic rituals, warnings, absurd images and emotional truths.
Through drawing and composition, we wanted to bring these sayings into a space where they could be looked at again, slowly.
Not as folklore preserved under glass, but as a living, playful and sometimes mysterious form of cultural memory.
The exhibition became an invitation to rediscover the invisible heritage we carry through language: the phrases we inherit, repeat, question, love, resist, and pass on without always knowing how deeply they shape us.
Urma alege
The title, Urma alege, speaks about what remains.
A trace, a consequence, a path, a sign left behind.
In many Romanian sayings, there is always a hidden movement between action and result, between choice and destiny, between what we do and what follows us. The proverb does not always explain. Sometimes it only points. It leaves an image behind and lets us understand it in our own time.
This is what we wanted the exhibition to hold: not answers, but traces.
Each work opens a small symbolic world, where humour and depth can exist together, and where the familiar becomes strange again.
A Proverbial Solo Show
For us, this exhibition was also a way of honouring the emotional intelligence of popular language.
Romanian sayings are often sharp, funny, poetic and unexpectedly visual. They speak through wolves, goats, fire, water, hands, birds, houses and paths. They compress entire human situations into a few words.
In translating them into images, we were interested not only in illustrating their meaning, but in listening to their atmosphere.
What does a saying feel like?
What kind of world does it open?
What kind of person, animal or gesture lives inside it?
Through this process, the works became less like explanations and more like encounters.
CREART Gallery
Presented at CREART Gallery in Bucharest, Urma alege marked the first exhibition project of the gallery in 2026.
The exhibition invited visitors into a space between playfulness and depth, between cultural heritage and contemporary visual experiment, between the spoken word and the imagined image.
It was, in many ways, a return to the stories we already know, but perhaps have not looked at closely enough.
Urma alege can be visited until 13 February 2026, from Monday to Friday, between 9:00 and 17:00, at CREART Gallery, Piața Alexandru Lahovari nr. 7, Bucharest.