Ioana Pioaru is a Romanian-British artist living in West Sussex, UK. She works with a variety of media, ranging from traditional drawing and printmaking to VR art-making and holography.

 

Ioana Pioaru has developed an extensive exhibition record which includes national and international solo and group shows.

Ioana’s latest project on urban identity ( AnnArt Gallery, Romania, 2022) – is a meditation on the effects of time and human intervention on Bucharest’s cityscape, highlighting some of the city’s most dramatic nodes where cultural history has lost contact with contemporary reality and meaning.

Her show at Gallery 286 in London (2022) reveals maximalism as the artist’s multidirectional approach to artmaking and reflects her engagement in a continual process of becoming – a method to access new tools for artistic expression.

Group and juried shows include the Small Print Biennale (Vancouver, 2016) and the Awagami Print Biennale (Japan, 2017) where she was awarded honourable mentions, as well as the Print Biennale in Tartu, Estonia (2018) where her work was voted the ‘public’s favourite’.

​

Ioana received her BA (2008) and MA (2010) from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where she studied fine art drawing. In 2021 she was awarded a doctoral degree by the University of Chester for her research into the concept of artistic maximalism. Her research culminated with the development of an original technique combining her traditional hand-drawing skills with the unique features of holography and virtual reality art-making. Through this technique, portraits of influential artists such as Andy Warhol or Marcel Duchamp, as well as depictions of endangered species of animals, created in virtual reality, are brought into the real world as achromatic holograms of a kind never seen before.