Suzana Dan was born in Bucharest in 1976. Her childhood was marked by displacement, isolation and the Romanian Revolution. Encouraged by the change brought on by this historical event, Dan – supported by the new system – allowed herself to hope, to be curious about art and culture and, like her father advised her, to have a ‘romantic’ outlook on life. Carried by this momentum, she enrolled at Liceul de Arta Brașov (Brașov/Brassó High School of the Arts) and later the Universitatea Națională de Arte București (1999) to study art. Uninterested in strict academic methodologies, she gleaned useful information to inject into her own practice and dedicated herself to specialised courses. A trip to Italy also proved influential in giving her an appetite for creating and experiencing aesthetic exaltation.
Following this feeling of boundless creative freedom, Dan explored, experimented and found her voice in the rapidly developing landscape of Romanian contemporary art, giving painterly surrealism a contemporary ironic twist thanks to healthy doses of humour. Balancing a micro and macro creative perspective, she cultivates chaos to reveal uniqueness and purpose.
In parallel, she also strove to protect this feeling, working for the department of conservation and heritage at the National Institute of Research and Development for Optoelectronics in Bucharest. Her representations have the aesthetic polished feel of graphic art and/or advertising all while ‘winking’ at the beholder via ironic symbolism, motifs and compositional choices. Dan’s not-so-subtle but highly entertaining infatuation with phallic allegories, for example, are an efficient way to subvert timeless tropes and create double entendres for those capable of reading the images both ways.
Dan lives and works in Bucharest.