Ghenadie Popescu

Ghenadie Popescu (b. 1971, Gura Căinarului, Florești district) is a Moldovan artist based in Chișinău. He came to art in his late twenties, after Soviet army service and a series of manual jobs, and studied painting at the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts in Chișinău (1998–2003), attending courses without being formally enrolled. For some two decades he has also worked as a restorer of pottery at the Ethnographic Museum in Chișinău, an institution that has shaped his interest in material culture and local history.

His practice spans performance, video, art objects, and stop-motion animation, to which he has primarily devoted himself since 2012. In the performance cycle "Mea" (2009–2011) he crossed Moldova on foot over three summers, pushing a yellow wheelbarrow loaded with red and blue raffia bags that together formed a makeshift Moldovan flag; one segment took him through Transnistria in six days. He frequently works with mămăligă, the traditional cornmeal porridge, as a sculptural material, and has produced a series of stop-motion animations dedicated to Moldovan rivers, including The Racovăț River (2013) and Ciorna River (2016). His long-term project Childhood Memories, Siberian Flavour (2018–2025) preserves eyewitness accounts of the Stalinist-era deportations from Moldova as animated oral histories.

Popescu's work has been shown internationally in group exhibitions including One Sixth of the Earth at MUSAC, León (2012), Attention! Border at Galeria Arsenał, Białystok and Galeria Labirynt, Lublin (2017), the 12th Kaunas Biennial "After Leaving | Before Arriving" (2019), the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara (2019), and the Ostrale Biennale in Dresden (2021). Recent solo exhibitions include Exit to the Sea at Bunker Gallery and a presentation at Plai Gallery, both in Chișinău (2024), and Residual at Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (2025), which travelled to Galeria Posibilă, Bucharest (2026). He undertook a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, documenting the two-month bicycle journey there as a series of artistic acts, and in 2014 he was artist-in-residence at the Rochester Institute of Technology through the CEC ArtsLink program. In 2022 he received the Contemporary Visual Arts Prize of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Moldova.

Across media, Popescu addresses local, post-communist configurations of identity, tradition, and geopolitics, using estrangement, hyperbole, and dark humor to register the absurdity of the world he lives and works in. He lives and works in Chișinău.