Andreea Alunei
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 6 min read
Andreea Alunei is a Romanian artist whose small-scale paintings blend personal symbolism with elements of folklore, children’s illustration, and religious iconography. Her work is shaped by major life events and everyday observations, using humor, vivid colors, and recurring characters to explore themes like motherhood, mortality, fear, and spiritual doubt. Drawing on her background in psychology, she often works from metaphor and intuition rather than fixed narratives. Her scenes are carefully built but open-ended, inviting close attention without asking for clear answers. The result is a world that feels fragile, strange, and at times quietly funny.
Q: Your paintings are rooted in two life-changing events — the loss of your mother and the birth of your daughter. How did painting help you hold both grief and joy at once?
A: Painting has always been my way to cope with existential dread — a kind of ongoing practice of letting go and living with uncertainty. Losing my mother made mortality real in a way I just couldn’t unsee. It shook me up, but also gave me clarity. I’m grateful for that. Becoming a mother shortly after was just as wild. Life came through me with barely any help from me. After witnessing a life disappear, watching one arrive felt both miraculous and strange. Suddenly, life and death weren’t just ideas — they were literally in my body.
That awareness of death hasn’t gone away. It borders on obsession. Psychological theories say our fear of death pushes us to find meaning in culture or religion. But honestly, I’ve never fit neatly into any one belief system. Instead, I’ve cobbled together a kind of spiritual patchwork — a “Frankenstein’s monster” of meaning, as I jokingly call it. And because I built it myself, I don’t fully trust it. I think my work comes from that tension.
Every painting is me trying to make sense of it all, fully aware that the effort is absurd and deeply flawed. But painting lets me hold the contradictions — grief and joy, doubt and belief. I’m fascinated by that in-between space, and by all the dichotomies that come with experiencing life as a human being.
Q: You often mention approaching painting with apprehension or even superstition. What does that moment look like when you decide a piece is ready to exist?
A: That’s a great question. The whole process is kind of strange and tangled. I have a million painting ideas at once — it’s always been a challenge narrowing them down and deciding which ones are ready to exist. I keep written notes, often long descriptions of paintings I might make.
From those, I pick the ideas that feel most urgent and make some rough sketches before jumping in.
Sometimes I think about a painting for years before even putting pen to paper. Honestly, I don’t fully know how the final decision happens — it always feels a bit impulsive.
There’s definitely a sense of urgency at the start. The painting has to feel relevant right now. And yes, I’m always a little scared and quite superstitious. I blame my Romanian upbringing. I do all sorts of small rituals in the studio — lighting a candle, saying a quick prayer, drinking hot tea. Somehow I also got the idea that if I paint what I fear, it can’t happen. So I often paint the things I’m afraid of. I’m not sure how I got here, but it seems to be a pattern.
Q: The characters in your work — unicorns, birds, children — shift between roles and meanings. Do you ever see them as stand-ins for yourself or people in your life?
A: Absolutely. When I first started painting, I thought of my work as autobiographical, like many women artists before me. But over time, it’s moved closer to autofiction. That gives me room to use personal experience as a starting point, but stretch it into something less confined and more imaginative. Cindy Sherman comes to mind, but also Kiki Smith, who blends myth, memory, and the body into something symbolic and open-ended.
I work with a big, shifting bank of symbols — some personal, others pulled from religious or occult imagery, or archetypes that just seem to stick. And yes, a lot of the characters are stand-ins for people in my life, including myself. But their roles aren’t fixed. Sometimes I paint from the perspective of the goat, who often plays a mother figure, and other times from the point of view of the child. It shifts from piece to piece. It’s all pretty fluid. I’m not that interested in rules. And I don’t expect viewers to decode it or figure out who’s who. They don’t need a legend. Their interpretation might be completely different from mine, and that’s totally fine. Maybe even better. It’s a build-your-own-journey kind of painting.
Q: There’s a fine line in your work between playful and unsettling. How conscious are you of tone when developing a scene?
A: I think about tone a lot. I often explore heavy material, but I don’t want to be a downer — for my own sake and for the viewer’s. I get suspicious when art feels overly emotional or unnerving, like it’s trying too hard or demanding something from me. I treat drawing and painting as a form of play. It helps me avoid getting stuck in intellectualization or melodrama, and lets me tap into an intuition beyond the logic of the mind.
I also make all kinds of formal decisions that aim to strike that balance. The colors I tend to gravitate toward — red, green, blue, and gold — are loaded with spiritual symbolism and have been used in religious paintings for centuries. I look at a lot of medieval manuscripts and like to prioritize symbolic and spiritual meaning over things like anatomical accuracy or proper perspective in my paintings. The vivid palette and unconventional mark-making often evoke the feel of children’s illustrations.
I prefer painting small, like the kinds of images you might find in a book, a home altar, or tucked inside a small church. Small paintings aren’t ostentatious — they ask the viewer to lean in, to bring their whole body closer. There’s a quiet humility in that kind of power. You can hold a small painting, take it with you on a trip, or hang it by the kitchen sink and catch glimpses of it throughout your day. That scale connects to domestic space and makes room for intimacy and daily presence. I also often paint on silk for its luminous and fragile qualities.
It’s funny that my paintings come off as unsettling. People often tell me I should watch certain horror movies that remind them of my work. But honestly, I can’t watch horror to save my life. Even light suspense or thrillers are too much. I pretty much stick to comedy.
Q: Your background in psychology clearly shapes your work. Do you ever feel like painting is a kind of self-analysis?
A: To an extent, yes. I’m usually trying to solve some kind of “problem” in a painting, and I use metaphor to look at very personal feelings. Because of that, there’s often an undertone of fear or anxiety in the work.
But that’s not my end goal. I try to let those feelings be and bleed into the painting as they must, while also being mindful not to just add more heaviness to the world. I paint to think more deeply and, ideally, to change my own mind about things. I face my demons and poke a little fun at them. I question them, and I question the conclusions I’ve drawn about reality. Taking the fear out of my mind and into a painting is an act of courage and a resolution to be free.
Once it’s on the surface in front of me, I can physically see how the monster is of my own making. It’s just an image. It’s not real. And maybe the thought behind it isn’t real either. Are the so-called facts of life — even death — really as solid as we think? I’m not sure. Maybe everything is a kind of projection, like a lot of spiritual traditions suggest. And if that’s true, then I can choose what I want to see.
And there’s a lot of power in that.
Q: Humor is a way for you to make fear lighter. Has it always been a tool for you, or is that something art helped unlock?
A: It’s definitely something I’ve unlocked over the years. I used to think I wasn’t very funny — and I still question it sometimes, mostly because my sense of humor swings between really dumb and just plain weird. But humor is a coping mechanism I hold close. I remember a college psychology professor calling it “the most sophisticated coping mechanism,” and I think he was right.
Humor brings me back to the present. It creates just enough distance between me and my fear to start questioning it. To make a joke, you have to step back and see things from a different angle. Ultimately, humor helps me not take myself too seriously — in painting and in life. That feels essential. When people tackle big metaphysical questions about life and death, they often get stiff and overly philosophical, or dark and emotional, depending on how well their coping mechanisms are holding up. I’m not really interested in either extreme. I want my work to bring a kind of blitheness to the conversation instead. I’d choose stupid over stiff any day.
