Noaptea Alba a Galeriilor The 20th-anniversary edition of the White Night of the Galleries took place in Bucharest, Romania, from October 2 to 4, 2026. Renaissance Art Gallery, based in the town of Voluntari—a suburb north of Bucharest—chose to present the second part of a…
Exhibited works at Renaissance Art Gallery part of exhibition The Sign of the Turtle by Hellene Diana Neagu- metal sculptor artist:7 May 2025 -1 June 2025 “Sign of the Turtle” by HDNaRT Hellene Diana Neagu metal sculptor artist, curated by Dr. Arh. , designer, curator,…
These series of works combine visual, abstract and figurative fragments, recomposed, of previous paintings that questioned the very problem of the fragment. The reconstruction of frames made at different stages of time in a single canvas involves a particular game, based on continuous analysis.
We are dealing with fragments of works that represented the theme of the limit, the chalk drawing of a circle, abstract images or photographs of objects that are part of a memory from the beginning of the artistic activity.
The group exhibition “Past, Present and Future” represents for Oana Visoiu Cutucache, owner of the Renaissance Art Gallery and for the first time CURATOR of a VISUAL art project, a new beginning because it coincides with the launch of a new concept R Art Space by Renaissance Art…
3rd of April 2025 was a full day of events at Renaissance Art Gallery for the launch of RENAISSANCE Magnolia scarf by Maria Costake in order to celebrate 18 years of my daughters birthday and 18 years since the Magnolia Tree was planted in the…
Romanian, b. 1996
2024 June Exhibition “Femininity Garden- Renaissance Garden”
Original botanical works and silk scarves available for sale:
click on Maria Costake website if you would like to buy on line the original botanical artworks in watercolour exhibited at Renaissance Art Gallery , where in Junie 2024 took place the first solo exhibition of botanical art in watercolor by Mariei Costake entitled Femininity Garden- Renaissance garden de Maria Costake or click on link Maria Costake silk scarves if you would like to buy the unique design silk scarves of Maria (please do not forget to mention the word RENAISSANCE when you do check out) , you will find also the newly capsule collection silk scarf Renaissance de Maria Costake– part of RENAISSANCE Collection – TUBEROSES Silk Scarf collection a refined mix between botanical illustration and jewelry design launched in autumn of 2024 and MAGNOLIA Silk Scarf collection launched in the spring of 2025 for the anniversary of 18 years of the magnolia that was planted as a gift for the birth of Ana Maria Visoiu in the Renaissance Art Gallery courtyard ( back then the home of Gallery Owner Oana Visoiu).
TUBEROSES Silk Scarf 2024: This project is the result of the close collaboration of three talented women, representing three different fields of activity, who came together to give birth to an authentic project:
The RENAISSANCE silk collection is a refined mix between botanical illustration and jewelry design, a merge of fine botanical arts and brilliant gemstones (citrine and diamonds) printed on silk.
The RENAISSANCE jewelry collection of gold and diamonds and citrine has as centerpiece a special gemstone, the CITRINE, which resembles the stone of the SUN. It’s a lucky charm, well known to attract property, money and wealth. A lucky stone that every woman should have. It also increases confidence and awakens the solar chakra in people’s life.
SHIR Fine Jewelry, a jewelry Belgian designer from Antwerp – the diamond capital of the world for several centuries, created a collection of gold and citrine specially for this collaboration.
MAGNOLIA Silk Scarf 2025: This project is the result of the close collaboration of two talented women, representing two different fields of activity, who came together to give birth to an authentic project made especially to celebrate LIFE- RENAISSANCE, more specific the celebration of 18 years of the life of Ana Maria, Oana Visoiu’s daughter, and of the magnolia plated as a christening gift for her, that now sits in the Gallery’s courtyard.
Please find below Maria Costake original art works , botanical art on paper and watercolor, exhibited in June 2024 at Renaissance art Gallery, who’s image are used on all Maria Costake scarfs that are designed by Maria herself, that can be acquired on line directly from Maria’s website Shop original art work by Maria Costake
Maria Costake is a botanical artist ( botanical painting floral painting in water color and on special paper ) who entered also the world of the designeri and fashion and created her own silk scarf line , cashier scarves line and is also a graphical and ilustrator having in her portfolio top brands.
Education
MA at Universitatea Națională de Arte, București, Arte Grafice – class 2020
Graduate la Universitatea Națională de Arte, București, Arte Grafice – class 2018
High school Colegiului Național Gheorghe Lazăr, București, math and informatics – 2015
Professional experience
Owner silk scarf by Maria Costake / 2022 – prezent
Teaching botanical illustration – workshops / 2024
Member of the Club Romanian Illustrators / 2017 – prezent
Independent Ilustrator / 2017 – prezent
Designer graphic at Coco Jardin / 2018-2019
Volunteer for Macondo / 2014
Clients
Therme, Clinica SwissMed, Salvați Copiii România în parteneriat cu Mercedes Benz, CDpress, Consulatul Senegalez, Consulatul Madagascarului, Editura Anglitira, Kossma Beauty (SUA), Parkerview Brews (Canada), Glow (Marea Britanie), Amelia & Arthur, Mamamonte (Coreea), Banks & Solander (Australia), Evergrow Christmas Trees (Canada), Traesh Store (Austria), Coastflora (California), Symbiofoods (DE), Renaissance Art Gallery (Romania)
Solo exhibitions
2024
Femininity Garden, Renaissance Art Gallery
Group exhibitions
2023
Cultural Carriage, Metrorex Romania
Travels, Romanian Illustrators Club at Romanian Library in Holland, Amsterdam
Open Art special, Rome Italy
Romanian Illustrators Club at Open Doors, Constanta Romania
Botanica – ArtHub, Bucharest
2021
Romanian Illustrators Club at Seneca AntiCafe, Bucharest
2019
Romanian Illustrators Club for Romanian Design Week, BCR building, University Square, Bucharest
Romanian Illustrators Club for Bookfest
2018
Art Factory at Uzinele Faur, Bucharest
Graduates’ exhibition at UNA Galeria, Bucharest
Romanian Illustrators Club at National
Romanian Illustrators Club for Bookfest
Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest
2017
Expo Pelicula at Cervantes Institute, Bucharest
Poster exhibition in Berlin Germany
Romanian Illustrators Club for Bookfest
The painting collection suggestively titled “Late Flowers” – LATE FLOWERS by the artist Iulia Toader exhibited in October 2024 on the ground floor of the Sky Tower office building in Bucharest Calea Floreasca, had its OPENING on October 15, 2024. This autumn, after a hot…
Exhibited works at Renaissance Art Gallery part of exhibition Femininity Garden- Renaissance Garden by Maria Costake- botanical artist :11 June 2024 -25 September 2024 “Femininity Garden- Renaissance Garden” by Maria Costake botanical artist and designer of silk scarves, including the 1st silk scarf Renaissance by…
Exhibited artworks at Renaissance Art Gallery part of exhibition Ammar’s Garden- Renaissance Garden :25 April 2024-10 June 2024
Ammar’s Garden- Renaissance Garden
curating by Dr. Arhitect, designer, curator & artist- Founder of Juxta Foundation
at RENAISSANCE ART GALLERY
Bucharest, 25.04.2024
Video curating exhibition & musical moment with Izabela Barbu-Jezebel
Ammar al Nahhas’ art is archetypal. Although at first glance it seems decorative in the sense that frescoes and wall art are decorative, i.e. they are part of the building in which they are installed, the artist’s oil painting that the Renaissance Gallery hosts goes beyond the threshold of the decorative mask, entering new territories of meaning where archetypes dictate and justify its existence.
We believe it is important to remember the artist’s origins because more often than not pure meaning is revealed by probing the depths of memory. Continuator of Fateh Moudarres as a timeless oneiric atmosphere and extracted from the physical place, the Syrian artist has brought to Romanian art a breath that I do not find since Țuculescu. A secret pattern woven between the threads of his canvases that supports a world encased in a large eggshell: a world awaiting its birth.
We support this idea with the pursuit of a discreet and attenuated eggshell white, present in most of the works exhibited in this opening and which creates the sensation that we find ourselves in an egg waiting for a new external existence and at the same time so pleasantly caressed and comforted by the inner garden of heaven in which we still have time to linger. Ammar’s garden does not exist in the outer Reality, it is a state of bliss to which he referred somewhere in a stage of his creation through the dervish leitmotif. Our argument is precisely that omnipresent window in his works, which immediately hierarchizes the artistic space as interior, because often these windows have the colours of the sky, serene, cloudy or twilight. These dotted windows are windows through which the inner world relates to a higher reality, and through which the soul can be viewed in its evolutionary process. Immersion in works of the Oriental portrait genre have the power to make us feel like co-authors of the inner garden and at the same time poignantly studied, somehow protected and somehow conditioned towards introspection, which is even more evident when we position ourselves at the centre of this collection of canvases. We position ourselves in a fragile garden of the beginning of self-knowledge, wrapped in a cosmic eggshell – omne vivum ex ovo.
Ammar’s garden is archetypal, as we have said of his art. Anyone who wants to contradict this statement should look very carefully at the traditional art of the Levant, and I would like to draw attention, for example, to the painting of Abu Zayd, the twelfth-century scribal artist and poet. We propose his painting on turquoise ceramics, Bol painted with a majlis scene beside a pond, from the MET Museum collection, joining it to the image that attracted the attention of the painter Ammar Alhnnas hundreds of years later: Pond at Mogoșoaia, more to admire and Women – Oriental. It is just one example of how an archetypal image crosses time and space to present itself again in the collective consciousness, through recollection, perhaps as goldfish glide smoothly across the water, occasionally disturbing the surface sheen with their presence. The gathering of meditative human figures, entranced by the poetry of the moment, gathered in this round field of spiritual communion, focused on the water and the pleasures of the spirit, but in a composition full of affection and mutual trust, of existing together, evokes peace, the same peace that Ammar’s works convey, through all the plastic means at hand, from the balanced colours to the massive and stable visual centre of each composition, often punctuated with primary colours, essences of the stable and perennial natural world: sky, sun, blood.
Ammar’s peace is a result of his order, somehow with reference to the juxtaposition specific to Eastern art, an order that binds and unbinds according to the artist’s laws, but always the same, modes of existence according to an immediately recognisable personal pattern. Let us not forget that the very word order and art have the same etymology from the root PIE ar- with the meaning of fitting together, going together, perfectly complementing each other. In Ammar’s painting we never find any element that is dissonant or that does not fit perfectly into the whole of his order as a virtuoso of visual balance.
Abu Zayd, bowl of a majlis scene by a pond, 1186 CE, stone paste, glazed in opaque turquoise, painted in polychrome in glaze and overglaze, 21.6 cm in diameter, Kashan, Iran (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Oriental art is characterized by stylization. Amar’s art takes stylization to a lyrical voice expressing itself in a very personal, almost intimate, idiolect of forms that successively coalesce or dissolve into waves of visual poetry.
The images of nature are more poetic than discursive, collections of symbols reiterated in each work, symbols that refer to an archetypal reality in which nature is not just nature, a garden is not just a garden, a pond is not just a pond. We see fish, birds, horses, -windows and trees dotted on canvases dominated by the human spirit. The red birds caught our attention, but not only them, with their gravity-defying poses, they are for us models of happiness, freedom and truth. They remind us of Bul Bul el-Hazar, the bird of happiness whose song chases away all evil, or the Talking Bird who reveals the truth of the beautiful Farizade, a Syrian story of the three sisters that we also find in One Thousand and One Nights.
But the fish with their smooth, fluid movements to the point of decomposition and communion with the water in which they exist are another story, one about eternal life. Fish are archetypal images that in all faiths are rooted in the idea of overcoming obstacles, the power of change and growth, fertility and harmony. By its continuous forward movement, it is recognized as an image for victory, but we believe that this victory of which Ammar’s works speak is one of spirit over matter, or light over darkness, in the world’s endless existence.
We connect with Ammar’s symbolism especially in this work by spotting the fish entwined in the pond, because water is the primordial element that sends us to the archetype of a path of healing, through emotion and meditation, through extraction from natural, material Reality, through escape from the visible garden back into an all-encompassing Invisible Garden where poetry is magic and colours exist simultaneously in the full spectrum of light. It is the emotion of water that signifies life that radiates from the work, in a universe evoked simply but powerfully through the perfect circle of continuous, eternal existence.
With the obvious evolution of the artist’s themes, we understand his approaching maturity, a plastic maturity and of the senses, and his works already appreciated in the Romanian collectors’ environment, are ready to adorn the walls of museums, especially this moving work of the Arabian horse. This mix of visual culture between the Levantine and contemporary worlds has values that propose the art of Ammar al Nahhas for an artistic heritage of future generations.
Dr. Arch. Iulia Toader
