Alina Veronica Petre (b. 1988, Călărași, Romania) is a Romanian artist who lives and works in Venice. She graduated from the National University of Arts in Bucharest in 2010 and shortly afterwards moved to Venice to continue her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her recent exhibitions include Ultimo Frame, Associazione 21, Lodi, Italy, 2026, and Homage to Failure, Ferma de Artă, Liteni, Romania, 2025. In 2026, she was an artist-in-residence at VIR Viafarini-in-residence in Milan and at Four Seasons Art and Scope, Ludao Lake, Foshan, China.
Her practice examines the relationship between human beings and nature, bringing together reflections on climate change, memory and spirituality. Drawing on historical painting techniques and a sensibility closely connected to pagan imagery, Petre creates works that evoke a realm suspended between the visible and the invisible, where the sacred emerges as an experience of reconnection with the natural world.
For ReA Art Fair 2026, Alina Veronica Petre presents Entering the Woods and Atlas, two works which, despite differing in technique and format, share a reflection on how we perceive the animal world. Her practice does not, in fact, originate from a religious imaginary, as it might initially appear, but from an awareness of the increasing fragility of ecosystems and the dominance human beings exert over nature. Animals become liminal presences: vulnerable figures that preserve a memory older than humankind and suggest alternative ways of relating to living beings.
In Entering the Woods, an animal figure – perhaps a lamb, perhaps several overlapping bodies – seems to dissolve into the vegetation. The eye cannot clearly separate the subject from the landscape: branches, leaves and fur merge. The woods are not simply a physical place, but an enigmatic space in which perceptual certainty is suspended and the boundaries between human, animal and plant life begin to blur.
This contemplative dimension continues in Atlas, a series of engravings on gilded wooden panels dedicated to the dogs that have passed through the artist’s life. The preciousness of the gold leaf, applied in hundreds of thin layers and at times allowed to oxidise during the process, does not serve to celebrate an icon. Instead, it creates an unstable image that shifts with the light and requires time to reveal itself.
Like relics of personal memory, these animals resist immediate interpretation, inviting the viewer to slow down. In their quiet presence lies the possibility of a relationship with nature founded not on possession, but on attentiveness, care and the recognition of a shared vulnerability.
Text by Valeria Conti
