Carmen Petraru

Artist Biography

Carmen Petraru is a contemporary visual artist born in Pitești, Romania, and based in Egypt. Her practice moves between abstraction and figuration, exploring how perception becomes emotion, memory, and visual language.

After a career in law and business development, Petraru turned to painting in 2018. Drawing on nature, landscapes, flowers, music, and human presence, she reinterprets these subjects through an intuitive process of reduction and transformation. Rather than pursuing literal representation, she distills them into evocative compositions in which forms emerge, fragment, and dissolve. Her paintings do not simply describe their subjects; instead, they trace their psychological and emotional afterimages.

Petraru’s paintings are characterised by dynamic gestures, layered surfaces, scraping, dripping, and a compelling interplay between translucent and saturated colour. Vibrant chromatic fields, punctuated by reds, oranges, yellows, and violets, create a visual rhythm charged with movement and tension. Through this expressive language, she examines the passage from observation to sensation, from fleeting experience to memory, and from memory to colour and form.

Transformation lies at the centre of her practice. Each painting evolves through continual revision, as images are obscured, reworked, and reconstituted. Her works occupy a shifting space between recognition and abstraction, inviting viewers to experience perception as unstable and subjective. Meaning emerges through the changing relationships among colour, gesture, texture, and form, allowing personal memory and association to become part of the work’s visual field.