Matei Dumitriu (b. 1995) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. He completed his studies at the National University of Arts in Bucharest (Painting department). In 2018, he started to incorporate more multimedia layers to his projects, working with digital printing, installation and video, while maintaining a day-to-day painting routine. Ever since meme trends became common language for the digital users, his main source of inspiration, present all throughout his works, is internet-based visual information.
Fro his second solo exhibition with Suprainfinit Gallery, he further expands the medium of painting through a new series of lightboxes, alternating them amongst canvases which jump in and out of reality, Feeding each other from internet-based visual information, the constellation of artworks transforms the gallery space into fragments of meta images whereby non-human elements possess agency and activity. By harnessing the online meme culture toward a heterotopia realm, Matei widens the boundaries between the virtual and the real, the uncanny and the familiar, the accident and the poetic, that have come to define the contemporary mindset.
Selected solo and group exhibitions: Sluggishness (2024), group show at Polansky Gallery, Prague; Joyrider (2024), duo show with Luca Florian at Zina Gallery, Cluj; Painting Certified (2023), solo show at Galerie Neueröffnung, Köln; A glimpse, approximately (2022), solo show at Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest; Cheap Thrills (2020), solo show at Atelier 35, Bucharest.
