Romanian-born American artist and poet Gene Tanta moves between painting, poetry, and translation to explore color, migration, and the politics of language. His practice treats translation as a material condition, an exchange between image and text, between the conceptual commons and interior life. Across media, he asks how we stay connected without losing ourselves, and how color, memory, and language negotiate new forms of care.

Shaped by the collectivism of Eastern Europe and the individualism of the American academy, Tanta’s work lives within the ways structures of power—nepotism among them—are reimagined by desire lines of freedom. From these passages emerge questions of belonging and autonomy: how much of the self must yield to share, and how much must resist to remain whole. These questions have been carried into sustained studio practice and international exhibition, including at WASP Working Art Space and Production in Bucharest and during a four-month residency in Timișoara. A two-time Fulbright grantee to Romania, Tanta holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and has taught at Columbia College Chicago and the University of Iowa.

Out of this inquiry grows Found Art Studio, where he develops painting and drawing cycles, reflexive games, and machine-assisted dialogues that extend reflection into experiment. Working between studios in Mt. Zion, Urbana, and Chicago, Tanta welcomes curators, collectors, and peers by appointment. His current body of work in oil revisits red through questions of hue, value, and temperature, tracing how shifts in color alter both seeing and the feeling of looking.

“... how much of the self must yield to share, and how much must resist to remain whole.”