Saddo

Saddo, born Raul Sebastian Oprea in 1981, is a Romanian artist and a graduate of the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. A founding member of The Playground, one of the first Romanian street art collectives, he splits his practice between painting, murals and illustration. His ambiguous scenes set beast-featured characters, often bird-headed, against dreamlike backdrops, mixing his taste for Rousseau, Matisse and Grayson Perry with a fascination for Iranian miniatures and Asian carpets and a love of hip hop culture. His series "Rise of the Bird People", shown in Portugal in 2014, flips the colonial narrative: the birds become the conquerors and humans are pushed back to a primitive state. He has painted at the Basilica of Saint-Denis (2022), Paris La Défense (2021) and Versailles (2020), and exhibited from Bucharest to Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal and Salvador.