Zoopolis is a home for fantastic ceramic creatures, imagined by artist Mana Bucur, through which she evokes material, time and a hybridized mythical animal horde, namely the griffins. Immersed in the memories of ancient creativity, the artist enthusiastically explores and brings to the surface unexpected combinations of ingenious forms with humor and fantasy, resulting in a kind of miniature monsters that are tamed and endeared with their playfulness.
These hybrid creatures can be plunged into the history of the griffin kingdom, bringing with them forgotten secrets from ancient times. Only in the hands of the artist can they come to life, materialize and then interact with each other in a fictional way in our imagination. If the previous cycles of the work started from the idea of a magic box-trap, in fact from the idea of the interior space, the content of things, which he rejected in his exhibitions, now this idea of the interior space is extrapolated, transformed and leads to the interior of the universe (“polis”) of fantastic characters. These are created by the artist’s imagination, and we feed them with our imagination.
Cora Fodor art historian