Opening Reception: Stitched Memories

Dana Florenta: Stitched Memories

An art show exploring emotions through the lens of memories

This in-person opening reception takes place in our first floor gallery, located one door north of the DANK Haus main entrance. Masks are optional for those who are vaccinated. Free parking is available after 6pm at 5/3 Bank, half a block north of the DANK Haus. Registration is not required.

In her new artwork series, painter Dana Florenta explores emotion through the lens of memories stitched together in a patchwork of colors that convey a seemingly simple yet powerful construct of the immigrant and the overall human experience.

Florenta started working on this series in 2020 when the world as we knew it collapsed and when lives, schedules, and future were left to the unknown. As a way of coping with the uncertainty, she relied on her past life experiences and gathered them together in an effort to make them tangible and reassuring.

Each Florenta painting is a portal into a conversation about memory and emotion. The colors, size of each color patch, gesture, and pattern reflect one meaningful memory leading to another. The colors never overlap with each other, there is peaceful cohabitation, and the more thickly applied colors make space but never burry smaller compositional elements.

While the placement and colors of shapes evoke intentional composition, there is spontaneity and gestural abstraction in Florenta’s art. The color patches seem to tell a specific story of a still moment in time. These small or bigger instants in time combine to tell a story that resonates in a familiar way to the art viewer. And because Florenta frees her work from literal context, her art feels personal and unique to one’s own perception. 

About the artist

Florenta likes to describe herself as an "Artist of the world". Born in Romania, where she graduated from an art academy, it is where her artistic soul took roots, sourced by her "bare feet childhood" in the beautiful countryside on the Danube River, by the love of her grandfather, by her German-speaking, art-loving father, and surrounded by the remarkable art of Brancusi and the ever-mesmerizing poetry of Eminescu. 

She later moved to France, where she lived in Bordeaux, Lyon, Paris, and Angers. She continued her personal and professional growth when she moved to New York. She is a Chicagoan for more than 10 years now. 

A versatile painter, Florenta experiments with materials and techniques.  She currently uses acrylics, oils, inks, pigments, and marble dust on canvas or wood panels.  

Her motto in art, as in life, is: "Every moment is an occasion. Rise to it!"