Radu Oreian, Retinal Vertigo, exhibition view, opening, photo by Petru Cojocaru. Courtesy of the artist and Art Encounters Foundation.
Radu Oreian: Retinal Vertigo
An institutional solo exhibition in Romania
January 23- March 21, 2026
Art Encounters Foundation, ISHO House, Timisoara, 300124, Romania
“Oreian’s paintings do not simply ask to be looked at closely; they expose the act of such looking….”
This major solo exhibition of Radu Oreian's work invites the viewer to embody the act of seeing, while gifting them a grand overview of the evolution of the artist's artworks from 2016-2026.
His visual world draws on mythology, memory, and alchemy, unfolding through tactile qualities of sight that he handles with notable restraint and care. His paintings often read like bas-reliefs, emphasizing volume and material presence. At times they resemble maps, of real or imagined terrains, where texture, scent, and layers of color guide the viewer's sense of direction. In the second part of this fascinating exhibition, we are introduced to the artist's universe of the home or the studio superimposed with the waves of a film that envelops these rooms in the dreamlike filter of new types of spaces, but also of characters, which endlessly devour each other.
Radu Oreian, Retinal Vertigo, exhibition view, opening, photo by Petru Cojocaru. Courtesy of the artist and Art Encounters Foundation.
1969 Gallery is pleased to announce Pas de Deux, the solo institutional exhibition of Emma Steinkraus
February 16- March 13, 2026
Washington and Lee University Staniar Gallery, 204 W Washington St, Lexington, VA 24450
Artist’s talk: 5:30 p.m. on March 5 in Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center for the Arts.
In this exhibition, Emma Steinkraus evokes vivid classical scenes, drawing from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and merging it into the contemporary world. “Steinkraus creates colorful, figurative paintings and installations that blend surface precision with playful, strange and exuberant imagery. Her process is anchored in visual research, weaving together wide-ranging art historical references with a contemporary sensibility.”
With play and precision her vibrant scenes touch on themes of femininity, transformation, the nude, and the relation of humans with other species. The gallery becomes a pas de deux, a paired dance between the past and the present.
Emma Steinkraus, “Peapod Daphne,” 2024. Oil on linen.
1969 Gallery is proud to share that Drew Dodge and July Guzman will be featured in Altered States in the Acid West at Utah MOCA
Drew Dodge, Spill, 2023, oil on canvas, 54h x 78w inches
July Guzman, Flying over Muir Woods, 2024, oil on canvas, 32h x 50w inches
"Altered States draws from the acid western genre that emerged in the 1970s alongside countercultural movements and a growing distrust of inherited histories. These films upended the familiar language of the Western—its heroes, landscapes, and myths—through surreal imagery, psychedelia, and spiritual inquiry. Instead of presenting the West as a place of destiny or conquest, acid westerns depict it as unstable terrain: disorienting, visionary, and charged with meaning beyond what can be easily named.
For generations, the American West has been imagined and reimagined as many things at once: a promised land full of Manifest Destiny; a symbol of rugged individualism; a site of paranormal speculation; and a resource to be conquered, extracted, and consumed. Altered States in the Acid West examines these layered projections, asking how they were built, why they persist, and framing the West as a complex site of encounters—between people and land, belief and myth, and the visible and unseen.
The exhibition also grapples with the deeper histories embedded in the region: the impacts of colonization, racial violence, and cultural erasure. These legacies are not relics of the past, but human experiences that continue to shape the political and social realities of the West today. Vast, sparsely populated landscapes have allowed isolation and extremism to flourish; simultaneously, these places draw spiritual seekers and fuel enduring mythologies that mirror America’s past and present.
Bringing together Indigenous practices, cultural and spiritual traditions, histories of extraction, and critical re-readings of Western lore, Altered States invites viewers to sit with contradiction, uncertainty, and possibility— to consider what the American West has been, and what it might still become."