In and Out of Wonderland 📍 Rezidența9 (I.L. Caragiale 32, Bucharest)

Artists: Jean-Michel Alberola ● Coco Amardeil ● Charlotte Houette ● Elsa & Johanna ● Olivier Mosset ● Jean-Baptiste Perrot ● Françoise Pétrovitch ● Miruna Radovici ● Stol Collective
Curator: Julia Marchand

Vernissage: 05.11.2026, 19:00
Dates: 05.11.2026 – 31.01.2027
Opening hours: Wednesday – Friday: 16:00 – 20:00 | Saturday – Sunday: 13:00 – 20:00

The exhibition In and Out of Wonderland is an ode to transformation. It brings together 10 artists from the French and Romanian art scenes and encompasses a wide range of media: photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings on photographs, installations and videos. It takes adolescence as its starting point, conceived here outside its biological context. As the ultimate realm of metamorphosis, adolescence becomes the prism through which we re-examine our relationship with reality. Our perception of reality stretches and dissolves, mirroring the subject undergoing transformation : both momentarily lose their stability. For a generation of millennial or Gen Z artists, this state of limbo becomes a universal condition, a window through which to grasp the world unfolding and surging around us.

The space at Rezidența9 embodies this principle of transformation. Each room thus brings together works from the Société Générale Collection and those by artists specially invited for the exhibition : Charlotte Houette, STOL Collective and Miruna Radovici.

The dialogues between the works are fruitful and surprising. With Olivier Mosset, a leading figure in post-war abstract painting, the transformation begins at the very heart of abstraction. Since the 1960s, the artist has been exploring the nature of painting by reducing its vocabulary to elementary, repetitive forms. Here, lines of pure colour follow one another across square canvases, before shifting – with the works by Charlotte Houette displayed nearby – into a space where the surface distorts, opens up and reveals other images. A more subtle dialogue unfolds with the lithographs of Jean-Michel Alberola, whose lines hover between drawing, writing and abstraction, crystallising the essence of his practice, which is founded on a constant questioning of the rules of painting.

The art of portraiture, too, traverses various states – from deliberate concealment to narcissistic assertion – through the works of Coco Amardeil and Françoise Pétrovitch. In the latter’s work, the bronze sculpture itself becomes a threshold figure, straddling the animal and human worlds, appearing and receding. This resonates with the works of the young artist Miruna Radovici, whose painting brings forth hybrid bodies and forms with unstable contours, as if captured in the midst of a fluid transformation.

Simulacrum, in turn, becomes a paradoxical site of authenticity when encountered alongside the works of Elsa & Johanna and Jean-Baptiste Perrot. The media and their modes of representation challenge our perception of what we are shown: seemingly ordinary scenes become sites of illusion and staging, whilst an image taken from a video game is rendered with the greatest possible realism.

Finally, the fairy tale becomes the setting for a collective body thanks to the STOL Collective, which continues the adventure of A Frog Night Dream, a film made with around twenty children, who were invited two years later to re-enact and recontextualise its set within the Rezidența9 space. Here, the imaginary no longer stands in opposition to reality: it becomes a collective way of transforming it, of dreaming and of exploring it together.

Julia Marchand

Generation! is a series of travelling exhibitions conceived with curator Julia Marchand and developed by the Societe Generale Art Collection, which was founded in 1995 and comprises 1,800 works. The series explores how a generational perspective influences artistic practices, the ways in which artists reflect on our time, and the intergenerational interpretations that can emerge from these different perspectives.

Rezidența9 is a contemporary culture center open to new generations of creators. We offer a diverse program featuring art, educational workshops, artist meet-ups, and debates on journalism and society. Through culture, we explore new perspectives on today's world.

Alongside Scena9, a magazine covering culture, ideas, and society and Școala9, a solutions-journalism platform for education, Rezidența9 completes the ecosystem of Fundația9 | BRD programs. This initiative by BRD Groupe Société Générale aims to showcase the new generation through cultural and educational programs.