Turbulence, 2023

acrylic on canvas
170 x 120 x 3 cm

Turbulence is part of a body of work titled Sequence of Events that expresses the artist’s interest in the start of time, the Big Bang – one of the topics she has found herself reading about extensively.

Mihaela Hudrea distills multiple references stemming from fields such as physics, astronomy, and philosophy into an abstract visual language that she develops quite intuitively, even playfully. Through crisp lines and a striking sense of colour, the artist creates symmetry, asymmetry and a range of movement and spatial tension across the canvas or the paper. By way of her meticulous process, she imbues the works with a meditative quality which challenges the hurried ways of seeing.

The following excerpt from a book that the artist has read recently resonates with the state of mind she puts herself in when painting: “We find ourselves, not as a central player in the life of the cosmos, but as a tiny epiphenomenon, flourishing for a brief moment as we ride a wave of increasing entropy from the Big Bang to the quiet emptiness of the future universe. Purpose and meaning are not to be found in the laws of nature, or in the plans of any external agent who made things that way; it is our job to create them. One of those purposes—among many—stems from our urge to explain the world around us the best we can. If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.” (Sean Carroll, “From Eternity to Here”)