New Genres: Artist Portrait

Artist Portrait: Ioana Palamar – Memory, Identity, Introspection

August 24, 2025 | Cosmina Marcela OLTEAN ArtPage

Ioana 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.

Violet Deppness (2017)

During her studies, she was awarded Erasmus scholarships at the Universidad del País Vasco in Bilbao (2011–2013) and at the Alanus Hochschule für Kunst und Gesellschaft in Bonn (2015). Later, she took part in international artist residencies in Germany (Alte Schule Hohenstein, Nürnberg), Belgium (Glo’Art, Lanaken), Slovenia (ART STAYS Festival, Ptuj), and Morocco (Da Slimane, Marrakech). Her artistic activity has been recognized through numerous awards and distinctions, including the “Dan Hatmanu” Grant – UAP Iași (2020), the Euroinvent Silver Medal (2019), as well as prizes at exhibitions and competitions in Italy and Germany.

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.

Another way of self-defence

Her style is defined by chromatic austerity and the fragmentary representation of the face and body, transformed into metaphors of memory and identity. Rooted in childhood and adolescent memories, her works convey both fragility and resilience. Critics have highlighted the apparent stillness, the suspension of time, and the tension between the ephemeral and the eternal that emerge from her practice.

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.

Sparkle (2023)

“The concept of my work intertwines itself within glances, within silences, within faces that quietly retreat into the shadows of the unconscious—where they ascend, piercing the cryptic heavens of a self not yet revealed. My hand wanders in search of the traces of two bodies, discreetly emerging beneath the shadow of an eye encircled by an infinity of other eyes, hidden in the soul’s skin of bygone times.

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.

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