Artist Portrait: Ioana Palamar – Memory, Identity, Introspection
August 24, 2025 | Cosmina Marcela OLTEAN ArtPageIoana Palamar (b. 1989, Rădăuți, Suceava, Romania) is a visual artist and lecturer at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iași, within the Painting Department. She holds a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degree from the same institution, and beyond her academic role, she is an active presence on both the national and international art scene.
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| Violet Deppness (2017) |
In exhibitions such as Crâmpeie de suflet (Fragments of the Soul, 2013), Palamar explored the theme of the eye as a space of introspection; in Anestezie (Anaesthesia, DANA Gallery, 2021), she analyzed the passage through life’s stages and the suspension of time through self-portraits and facial fragments; while DUNKELHEIT (2023) and Nexuri (2023) offered audiences an intensely emotional vision, blending figuration and abstraction into immersive atmospheres.
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| Another way of self-defence |
For Ioana, the creative act is more than visual expression: it is a way of being, a form of existence and breathing. “Even a landscape can be an ‘selfportrait,’ because it reflects my way of being, of conceiving art, of existing through it and therefore of breathing,” the artist affirms. This statement reveals the profoundly subjective dimension of her work, where self-portraiture transcends the literal face and becomes any visual form that reflects the inner self.
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| Sparkle (2023) |
I open one door, then another, and another still—onward, into infinity—in an endless search for selves... A (non-)face gazes back, contemplative, beyond the window of a seasonless sky, merging with the humble rise of a blade of grass, or with some extension of the nostalgia that has haunted me for years. And now my layered melancholy yellows, ripens, and suddenly falls, like an overripe fruit, stripping my eye bare and leaving it Naked in the darkness of Light.”
In essence, Ioana Palamar is an artist of introspection and memory, who transforms pictorial fragments and silence into spaces of reflection and reconnection with the self, inviting viewers into an experience of self-discovery.
This article presents a selection from her artistic universe, spanning paintings, ceramic works, and acrylic pieces.
This article presents a selection from her artistic universe, spanning paintings, ceramic works, and acrylic pieces.
Discover more of her works and artistic journey by visiting her website and
personal pages, where she regularly shares new artworks, articles, and accounts
of her artist residencies.
Photo credits - Ioana Palamar
"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."
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