Artist Biography

Cristina Marian is a Romanian-American visual artist best known for her highly experimental layered paintings investigating the notion of becoming, rather than being within fixed and stable grounds. Her work explores such themes as her experience within her community; togetherness and the sense of belonging; communal and global changes; and finding peace within unpredictability.

As a child, Marian lived between two vastly divergent political regimes and witnessed the violent Romanian Revolution of 1989. Then, at age 13, she moved by herself from a small village in the Romanian countryside to a city of two million people to follow her dream of studying art. Around the same time, Marian lost her childhood home to a fire. Still, she completed her studies, established her career as an artist, and later immigrated to the U.S. These experiences contributed to the feeling of permanent transition, which strongly influences her artwork.

Marian holds a BFA in Painting from the National University of Fine Arts in Bucharest, Romania, and an MFA from Montana State University, Bozeman.

She works with a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, and public installation. She has exhibited internationally, including in Bucharest, Paris, Oslo, Dakar, and Vienna. In America, Marian’s work has been shown throughout Montana, in Cincinnati, OH and in Spokane, WA. Her most recent group show was Private Space at Manifest Gallery in Ohio. Nowhere To Be But Here is her most recent solo exhibition at the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana. She divides her time between working in the studio, exhibiting her artwork, teaching, and spending time with her husband and their two-year-old baby.