1 March - 21 April

Maximalism
A solo group show by
Iona Pioaru

Regarding the holograms: I like to call them Holographic sculptural drawings.

I start the process by making sketches (with pencil or ink on paper) of the subject, from different angles, to familiarise myself with the proportions and volume. Then I photograph these sketches and bring them into a virtual reality art-making app called Tilt Brush, and use them as reference images. The app allows you to draw in three dimensions (rather than on a flat surface) - ‘virtual ink’ flows out of the hand-held controller and remains stuck in mid-air. So every stroke that makes up the drawing has to be carefully drawn by hand.

When I’m happy with how the VR sculptural drawing looks, I export the project from VR and give it to Geola (Lithuanian holography company). They extract from it (render) the image data for the digital holographic printer. Then they use this data to print the single parallax hologram on glass (coated with a photoresist material).

Ioana Pioaru, March 2022

The artworks presented in this exhibition, created between 2016 and 2020, accompany Ioana Pioaru’s doctoral thesis – ‘A practice-based approach to defining maximalism’.

Pioaru’s art embodies a twofold understanding of Maximalism: on the one hand, a mode of artistic expression intrinsic to the artwork, characterised by an engagement with the limits of the medium; on the other hand, a quality of the process of artmaking, a strategy which the artist employs to decentralise the artistic self.

More details visit Gallery 286

Gallery installation views

Iona Pioaru and her work at Gallery 286, London, March-April 2022