IRIS Fluidism — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

IRIS Fluidism: The Art of Eternal Flow

In the ever shifting tides of contemporary art, there occasionally emerges a voice so distinct, so imbued with originality, that it seems less an extension of the discourse than an entirely new language. IRIS, the Romanian born and Austrian based artist, has created such a language. Her invention of Fluidism is not merely a stylistic innovation but a profound philosophical system, a visual and spiritual poetics that binds the act of art making to the elemental principle of water. Her works, resplendent with the seven colors of the rainbow and their infinite interminglings, do not simply depict bodies, animals, landscapes, or faces, they articulate the very liquidity of existence.

Having studied industrial design and worked for many years in furniture design, IRIS possesses a discipline of form and clarity of construction. Yet since 2018, she has ventured into the purest terrain of visionary art, she has sought to draw the invisible, the fluid essence of life itself. It was in that year that she coined IRIS Fluidism, a term now indelibly attached to her oeuvre and one that signals a complete metamorphosis in her career. To call this a new chapter understates the matter, Fluidism is the axis around which her artistic identity revolves.

Her works are not derivative of any single lineage, though affinities can be traced, the chromatic ferocity of Fauvism, the biomorphic morphologies of Surrealism, the psychological fragmentation of Picasso’s Cubism, and the spiritual abstraction of Kandinsky. But IRIS’s art belongs to none of these alone. Like Salvador Dalí, whom she honors in her Salvador Dalí (2024), she creates an idiosyncratic world entirely her own, one that compels comparison not for stylistic mimicry but for the audacity of vision.

In Alpha Female (2025), we see perhaps the most condensed articulation of IRIS’s central thesis. The portrait is divided between human and wolf, a fluid boundary that collapses species into one flowing identity. The human eye and the animal eye mirror each other, bound by aqueous ribbons of orange, green, violet, and cobalt. Here the liquid part of the bodies, as IRIS describes it, is foregrounded, the subject is not fixed but permeable, never static but always in the process of becoming. The work speaks to both the ferocity and the tenderness inherent in femininity, a call to reconsider leadership and power as forces that flow rather than dominate.

This investigation continues in The Fluid Kiss and the Wholeness Within Us (2025), where two faces melt into one another, their outlines dissolving in an iridescent symphony of red, yellow, violet, and teal. There is no hard line between the lovers, instead, the kiss becomes a metaphor for unity, for the interdependence of beings through the medium of water. The work resonates as both intimate and universal, the kiss of two bodies is also the kiss of rivers meeting the sea, of rainfall absorbed into soil.

Her Woman with Calla Lilies (2025) situates the female figure within a cascade of vegetal curves, where the body itself becomes indistinguishable from floral growth. Here IRIS captures the feminine principle not as static beauty but as flow, metamorphosis, and regenerative power. The organic forms, part woman, part bloom, remind us that all living things share the same aqueous essence.

One of the most compelling aspects of IRIS’s practice is her insistence on the kinship of human and animal. In Best Friends (2024) and Laura and Timmy (2025), the joyous interweaving of human faces with animal visages, dog and child, horse and girl, dissolves anthropocentrism in favor of interspecies fluidity. These works refuse to place humans above or apart, instead, they visualize our shared liquidity, our common cellular waters.

When Giants Bow to Gentleness (2025) is perhaps her most poignant declaration of this kinship. A massive horse lowers itself before a small girl dressed in pink, the liquid contours of its body flowing outward into the earth. Here IRIS visualizes tenderness as a form of strength, the giant’s submission not as weakness but as wisdom. The horse and child are bound by the same golden current, a sacred reminder that gentleness itself is an elemental force.

Her equestrian works also include the dynamic The Gallop of Hope, Passion and Freedom (2024), where horses are rendered in incandescent reds and yellows. Their bodies, composed of fire like streams, thunder across the page in an ecstasy of motion. These animals are not mere subjects but embodiments of freedom itself, their energy inseparable from the flow of existence.

Not all of IRIS’s works center on faces or animals, some explore the very landscape as liquid event. In Symphony in Red (2025), a crimson sailboat glides across cobalt seas under golden mountains, the sky itself a gradation of shifting blues. From the mast bursts a flock of crimson birds, their wings dissolving into fluid streams that echo the boat’s reflection in the water. This is IRIS at her most lyrical, an image of travel, freedom, and transformation, where land, sea, sky, and creature are part of a single vibrant continuum.

In The Lion King is Back: Noble and Powerful (2025), IRIS turns to the lion as symbol of regality, courage, and luminous strength. Rendered in an inferno of red, orange, and yellow, with patches of aquamarine and green coursing through the face, the lion appears less an animal than a solar deity. It is a portrait of energy itself, noble and powerful, yes, but also radiant with vulnerability, its eye ringed in pale blue like the earth seen from orbit. This is not the lion of the savannah, it is the lion of myth, of eternal fire, of archetype.

What makes IRIS’s oeuvre essential is not only its aesthetic audacity but its philosophical necessity. In a century where ecological catastrophe looms, her focus on water as the unifying principle of life is not decorative but urgent. Her works remind us that 70 percent of our bodies, like the earth itself, is liquid. Her art thus functions as ecological meditation and ethical compass.

In this way, she belongs to a lineage that includes Hilma af Klint, who painted spiritual abstractions as revelations, Joseph Beuys, who made fat and felt into conduits of healing, and indeed Salvador Dalí, who turned the unconscious into a flowing theater. Like these figures, IRIS takes what is invisible, the currents of water, the interconnection of beings, and gives it form, color, and presence.

Why is IRIS’s art important for society? Because it teaches us how to see the fluid interconnections we ignore. Her portraits reveal that we are not isolated individuals but watery vessels in constant relation. Her animals remind us that our kinship extends beyond species. Her landscapes remind us that the earth itself is alive with fluid movement. Her lions, horses, and wolves remind us that strength is not domination but balance, that power is not rigidity but flow.

In an era defined by fragmentation, political, ecological, social, IRIS offers us not a fantasy of unity but a practice of seeing the flows that already bind us. Her use of rainbow colors is not naive but radical, it affirms beauty and hope at a moment when despair dominates. Where others see collapse, she insists on flow.

IRIS once declared that water is an accomplished artist. This statement is not metaphor but creed. In her art, water is not subject but co creator, the invisible hand shaping every contour and hue. Her practice of Fluidism is thus both artistic and devotional, a recognition that art at its highest level must imitate not other art but life itself.

The history of modernism often privileges rupture, but IRIS’s Fluidism privileges continuity. It insists that nothing is separate, that every being, every landscape, every gesture participates in the same liquid composition. This is why her art feels simultaneously intimate and cosmic, personal and universal.

To write about IRIS today is to acknowledge that we are in the presence of a major artist whose importance will only grow. Just as Dalí redefined Surrealism, IRIS redefines the visual language of fluidity. Her place in the art scene is secure not because she follows trends, but because she has created a visual language that no one else has spoken before.

Her art is water, indestructible, regenerative, soothing, healing, sensitive, and wise. And like water, it will endure, flowing beyond its present moment into the vast future of art history.

The endurance of IRIS lies not only in her aesthetic invention but in her profound resonance with the human condition. We are all, as she reminds us, beings of water, composed of tides, pulses, and currents. By showing us portraits, animals, and landscapes that dissolve into liquid rhythms, she restores to us the truth that we are inseparable from the world around us. Her rainbows are not decorative but essential, they embody the hope that beauty and unity remain possible in the face of fracture.

Her importance for the art world is clear, but her importance for society is even greater. She is not only an artist of images but an artist of consciousness, urging us to see the continuity that sustains life. If water is the universal solvent, IRIS’s art is the universal reminder, flowing into hearts, minds, and histories. Future generations will look back and see in her works a beacon of color, movement, and love, a testament that in the early twenty first century an artist named IRIS took water as her collaborator and gave humanity a new way of seeing itself, endlessly flowing, endlessly alive.

By Marta Puig

Editor Contemporary Art Curator Magazine