Marcel Rusu

Marcel Rusu (b. 1989, Mediaș, Romania) is a contemporary artist living and working in Romania known for merging traditional and digital media to create hyperreal, socially engaged works that often reflect on architectural space, identity, and the socio-political landscape of Eastern Europe. 

Having completed his BFA, MFA, and DA studies at the renowned University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, his artistic language skillfully merges the boundaries between oil painting, photography, and digital image rendering. He begins by digitally constructing his compositions, often employing photography and computer-generated imagery as the foundation for his scenes. These manipulated visuals serve as blueprints that he then translates onto his canvases with oil painting and acrylic airbrushing. 

At the beginning of his artistic career and oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Rusu started exploring surfaces and materiality, entering into direct and mechanical competition with photography through painting. His visual grammar is shaped by the collision of modernist ambition and Soviet-era architecture, the rise of consumerism following the collapse of Communism, the mundanity of Black Sea holidays, and the psychological weight of political transition. Intrigued by how imagery is perceived in a world overflowing with visual content and through his manipulation and mixing of media, Rusu investigated how he could best record reality whilst questioning the presumption that such a record is objective, accurate, or even “reality”. 

Rusu grows his aptitude for blurring the distinction between the synthetic and the authentic by depicting Los Angeles in his latest series Mirage City (2025). These pieces transport viewers to the sun-soaked city where both global fantasy and personal fiction converge. Rusu presents the city as a simulacrum: a place he has never visited but that has been filtered to him through the alluring worlds of cinema, music, video games, and mass media. Rusu creates eerily familiar yet distant realms — a visual echo chamber where dream and experience coexist.