Paul Robas

Paul Robas (b. 1989, Romania) is a Vienna-based artist whose multi-layered paintings explore memory, identity, and ambiguity. His process begins with photographs, both found images and those he takes himself, which he manipulates and translates into painting in successive layers of acrylic, ink, and oil. Faces and figures dominate his imagery, rendered both accurately and abstractly to offer fleeting impressions that resist narrative clarity, while vignette-like still lifes of dice, chandeliers, smoke, and flowers exist in isolation, without context. Most of the paintings carry a dreamlike atmosphere in which shifting figures evoke faded or uncertain memory. His exhibition Almost There at Make Room, Los Angeles (2026) examined the temporality of life through imagery that is at once distant and familiar.

Robas studied drawing, printmaking, and photography at the University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca (BFA, 2011) before earning an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2018); his early work in printmaking and black-and-white photography informs his layered painting style. Solo exhibitions include Almost There, Make Room, Los Angeles (2026); Hindsight, The Shophouse, Hong Kong (2025); Standstill, Alice Amati, London (2024); and No time to explain, Galleria Solito, Naples (2023). He has participated in group exhibitions at Alice Amati, London; Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (A Small Land of Watery Light, 2024); The Shophouse, Hong Kong; Galerie Claire Gastaud, Paris; Przyszła Niedoszła, Warsaw (2023); and New Jörg, Vienna (2021), and presented a duo presentation with Ilaria Vinci at Artissima, Turin (2025).