Scemtovici & Benowitz

Str. Jean Louis Calderon 34, București
Extended Hours

Gentle is the Night, Soul is the Garden

With Diana Oțet
Curated by Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu
"Diana Oțet stages poetic-narrative spaces, true visual poems, meditating on the theme of intimate and personal everyday life. Her tender representations, transfigured through simple and clean brushwork, capture the immediacy of the close universe she experiences with tranquility and calm, all measured by the unit of her son's embrace." (Raluca-Ilaria Demetrescu, exhibition curator)

Tell us about Scemtovici & Benowitz.

Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery opens the doors of an early 20th century house, transformed into a contemporary art gallery. Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery is the creative space of the present age, with spearheads thrown into the future, a nursery for young creators and a useful laboratory for observing what was created before us and laid the foundations for what we are today. In the midst of the (dis)order of post-disciplinarity and eclecticism within art forms, in the space of our (meta)gallery for contemporary creation, we want to link good taste with boldness, to host artists who challenge the truths, to open (new) paths for some unjustly forgotten by workshops, as well as for the established. We are living through a colourful time with plagues, wars, energy crises, new beliefs and mythologies with one foot in the future. "All is old and all is new" and because this is part of our belief, we will try to match in one place the romanticism, the loneliness of the demiurge artist who like Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer" observes the skies and the self, the postmodernism of (de)constructions, actualities, concepts, architectures and structures of the present arts. Adding to current ideas the traditions of art, we want a dialogue in the heart of contemporary sensibilities in the age of post-truth and false information.

What do you have upcoming?

With an intense artistic and pedagogical activity, Diana Oțet returns for the second time to the walls of the Scemtovici & Benowitz gallery. Featuring smaller colored graphics on wood panels and large oil-painted canvases, the works created between 2019 and 2024 (most of them new) are gathered under the title Gentle is the Night, Soul is the Garden.