Cristina Schek
b. Transylvania, Romania | lives and works in London
Cristina Schek is a London-based Transylvanian Surrealist working primarily across photography and digital montage, with her practice extending into textile, sound, installation and public art.
Her work begins in the photographic world and then slips elsewhere. Drawing from her archive, Schek layers and reassembles images into new realities where people, animals, plants, objects and fragments of memory acquire unfamiliar lives. Her work wanders through the uncertain territory between what happened, what is remembered and what imagination inserts in between. Drawing on literature, cinema, art history and the subconscious, Schek constructs layered visual worlds in which identity, nature and reality remain fluid. Transformation and metamorphosis recur throughout her practice: bodies become landscapes, vegetation borrows human form, domestic objects take on symbolic lives and the work becomes theatrical, uncanny and psychologically charged.
Her work has been exhibited internationally across museums, galleries, art fairs and public spaces, including EXPO CHICAGO, Art Miami, British Art Fair, Phillips London and Wimbledon Museum. In 2026, her mixed-media installation Her Court was presented at Wimbledon Museum during the Wimbledon Championships. The central work from the project, Mid-Air, was subsequently selected by Dr Helen Pankhurst CBE for Centenary Action and reproduced on cards sent to every woman MP in the UK Parliament as part of the organisation’s campaign for equal representation. Schek has received a number of distinctions including First Prize in the Young Masters People’s Choice Award 2025, Highly Commended for the Rudolph Blume Foundation Acquisition Award 2025, the MAS Digital Art Award 2024 and the Young Masters Focus on the Female Award 2021. She has three auction records, including two with Phillips London.
In 2023, Schek was selected for London’s W4th Plinth with The Ceiling in the Sky, a monumental 4 × 4 metre public artwork transforming the canopy of Windsor Great Park into a cathedral-like vault populated by angelic figures. The work was unveiled by celebrated actress Dame Siân Phillips. In 2026, Schek returned to the W4th Plinth with Fern Girl, becoming the first artist in the programme’s history to be exhibited on the site twice. The work was unveiled by art historian and gallerist Cynthia Valianti Corbett, Founder and Director of Cynthia Corbett Gallery, who has presented Fern Girl internationally through the gallery’s programme, alongside Dr Karen Liebreich MBE, Founder and Director of Abundance London and Aura Woodward, Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in London, whose distinguished cultural career includes work with HM King Charles III’s international charities. The unveiling took place with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute in London.
Her work is held in private and institutional collections in the UK, Europe, Turkey and the United States.
Cristina Schek is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.
Selected Press
Following Schek’s 2026 exhibition Line of Beauty at The Exhibitionist Hotel, South Kensington, art critic, art historian, author and lecturer Estelle Lovatt FRSA wrote:
“In a league of her own, Cristina Schek’s incredible visual adventures embrace life, beyond life. Piloting artistic vision between reality and imagination, I’m calling it Surreal Neo-Romantic Universalism. Questioning what’s factual by what’s make-believe, Schek bends Einstein and Newton, making her new artwork fairytales for grownups.” — Estelle Lovatt FRSA