BIO:
Doina Mihaela Iacob (b. 1971, Romania) is a contemporary mixed-media artist whose practice centers on material transformation and systems of value.
She began her artistic path in the Romanian animation industry, developing a disciplined technical foundation, precision in execution, and a sensitivity to visual narrative. She later mastered the traditional Galle technique of reverse painting on glass—an exacting process that sharpened her attention to layering, surface, and the structural relationship between image and material.
In 2004, Iacob emigrated to the United States, bringing with her a visual language informed by Eastern European craft traditions and shaped further by contemporary Western cultural contexts.
Now based between Illinois and Indiana, her work incorporates decommissioned currency—primarily shredded U.S. dollars and German Deutsche Marks—embedded into mixed-media compositions. Through labor-intensive processes of dismantling, compression, and reconstruction, materials once intended for circulation are reconfigured as fixed physical structures, examining how value shifts when removed from economic function and re-situated as material memory.
PRACTICE:
Working at the intersection of painting, sculpture, and architectural surface, Iacob treats material not as representation but as evidence. Currency—once a symbol of exchange and authority—is physically altered and reassembled into new configurations where meaning emerges through tension, repetition, accumulation, and structural restraint.
Rather than depicting power, the works investigate how invisible systems operate: how value is assigned, how institutions shape behavior, and how material carries memory long after its original function disappears.
Her ongoing body of work, Portraits of Invisible Power, explores structures of obligation, containment, resistance, and endurance through a sequence of interconnected artworks developed as a unified conceptual series.
MATERIALS AND FOCUS:
*Mixed Media
*Shredded Currency
*Reclaimed Materials
*Structural Assemblage
*Conceptual Contemporary Art
*Material Memory
*Institutional Critique
For exhibition inquiries and studio contact:
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