Delia Popa and Julie Crenn share a desire to make rural areas visible. It remains an unthought-of part of the collective imagination. We speak of the countryside as if it were an undefined, unlocated space, as if it were a non-place.
Artist: Delia Popa
Curator: Julie Crenn
15 May 2025 – 1 July 2025
26 Popa Soare Street, Bucharest
Anca Poterasu Gallery is pleased to present Delia Popa’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, titled Loc de acțiune – Crețești, curated by Julie Crenn. The show creates a space where local heritage, global influences, and personal history intersect, challenging the marginalization of the rural world in contemporary culture.
Since 2020, Delia Popa has been focusing on her place, the village of Crețești located in the commune of Vidra, in southern Ilfov County. In her grandparents’ house, she establishes her studio.In 2022, starting from this precise location, she works in harmony with the house: the furniture, the ceramic tiles adorning the wood burning stove, the architecture, the wood, the everyday objects. She also works with the garden ecosystem: the walnut tree, the greenhouse, the crops, the human and more-than-human inhabitants.
Around the house, she spends time observing and documenting climatic, structural and topographical changes. Delia Popa observes the ways in which human constructions take precedence over living things. In this way, she photographs moments of change and transformation in the village: trees lying down, trees deliberately cut down, the construction of a bridge, housing, shops. Crețești is in a state of flux. And that’s exactly what the artist is concerned with: a mutation that has both a cheerful dimension and critical aspects.
So, since 2020, Delia Popa’s ambition has been to fabricate a space of representation where cultures and practices sediment: architecture, vernacular techniques, traditions, landscapes, materials, gestures, crafts, etc. The paintings and ceramic works participate in a reconnection of Crețești’s inhabitants with their shared history and present. Why? Delia Popa writes: “Why then is this rural world important? Because 46% of Romanians live there, we all come from there and it is a world (still) connected to nature, although that is rapidly disappearing. Because we need to look at what/who we are.” Crețești is thus an artistic, social and political subject in its own right. A subject that generates a de hierarchization: all places have a value that artists can bring to the fore.
