Lost of Us Otilia Boeru

Otilia Boeru
Lost of Us
curator Adriana Oprea

18 November – 18 December 2025
Alert Studio
2 Mircea Vulcănescu St, Bucharest
Opening: 18 November 2025, 6pm

The textile installations and collages of Otilia Boeru speak, in the artist’s own terms, about the condition of human beings and living creatures in the Anthropocene era—an era they navigate surrounded by the omnipresence of screens and technologies that generate dreams and images, immersed in platforms, interfaces, and algorithmic networks, digital codifications of the living body, pseudo-realities, and existential surrogates. Although self-generated products of human civilization according to the perspective foreshadowed by the current course of events, as we are well aware, lead toward ecological collapse, nuclear proliferation and global war, pandemics of depression and anxiety— a cumulative regression toward (self-)extinction.

Using heterogeneous materials, the artist’s soft sculptures, assemblages, reliefs, and textile prints align with compositions built from insignificant materials and leftovers from the studio—lint, dust, flakes of paint detached from working surfaces—in order to coagulate an ambivalent and paradoxical overall view. The trans-corporeal de-materialization to which human life is exposed today can nevertheless be counteracted by attempts, such as the one proposed here by the artist, to return to humanity, to embodiment and the reappraising of the living being. Within this thematic field—shared within series of textile works created over the years—Otilia Boeru makes use of the aesthetic metaphor of human hands, displayed in conglomerates and textile installations that are multi-textured and left unfinished, generic and anonymous.

As a synecdoche for the human body perceived as medium and catalyst of experiences beyond itself—as part for whole, as element within a much wider multitude (for instance, through interweaving in a textile assemblage with monumental allure)—the depiction of hands reveals the complex relationship between control and freedom, presence and absence, connection and solitude, hope and despair, dissociation and interdependence. The loss of self, abandonment, dissolution, and helplessness to which the artist’s project ultimately refers, comment on the status of the witness in relation to one’s own condition—a status that pushes the human being to the margins of humanity. Contemporary ecocide thus equates with a progressive and silent anthropocide, in which humans themselves seem to become exponents of what has been called “ghost species.”

The ecological-moral melancholy in the title of this selection of works invites to meditate on the possibility that the human species may be surpassed by its self-constructed environment, offering a reading of the present that portrays a demobilized, non-viable human population on the path to extinction within its own fully humanized planet. Directly and synaesthetically approaching the viewer, Otilia Boeru’s textile works adopt a frontal approach, a deliberately frank and direct concept that displays the raw mirror of a vulnerable humanity on the verge of self-exclusion, reduced to matter and remnants—a redundant reality owed to itself.

Otilia Boeru is a visual artist whose practice centers on the expressive potential of the textile medium—a visual language often neglected and marginalized. Through material and technique, she seeks to recover and capitalize on the aesthetic contributions traditionally associated with women’s work, highlighting the emotional and cultural depth found in textile forms. Her installations are composed of soft objects and tactile surfaces—woven, printed, or painted—that reflect both personal introspection and responses to the external world. The fragility of the human being, psychological vulnerability, existential uncertainty, and injustice are recurring themes in her work, inviting the viewer into a space of reflection and emotional resonance. Otilia teaches at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where she continues to cultivate dialogue between matter, meaning, and contemporary artistic expression.

Author of numerous essays and articles on Romanian contemporary art, Adriana Oprea has collaborated for more than 20 years with artists, publications, and art institutions both in Romania and internationally. Trained in art history, Adriana is a curator and art critic, contributor to Arta magazine since its new series launched in 2010, and museum curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest since 2006. At MNAC she coordinated the production of solo and group exhibitions organized between 2014 and 2017, and continues to oversee the museum’s documentary archive dedicated to contemporary art. A member of the International Association of Art Critics since 2013, she curates primarily projects signed by contemporary women artists.

Acknowledgements: Radu Boeru (graphic design).