Being vs. Having

Being vs. Having is a solo exhibition by Quentin Hubert at Kulterra in Bucharest, which I curated. It gathers fifteen years of painting around one idea. A person exists before they possess, and what matters most lives in that difference.

About Being vs. Having

The exhibition opened on 23 July 2026 and ran until 5 August. Its title comes from a conversation I had with the artist a year earlier, on the way out of MoBU, the international art fair in Bucharest, while we looked for the core of his work.

The paintings are read through Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle and the idea of the sacred. Works such as Reification, Before Greed and Communion set the earth and the community against accumulation. A wall of portraits brings together Frida Kahlo, Bob Marley, Joan of Arc and Brigitte Bardot, people who refused to become objects.

The exhibition text was shown in Romanian and English. A QR code at the entrance led visitors to all the paintings and texts on the artist’s page.

Read the full review in Quentin Hubert, Being vs. Having exhibition.

Works in Being vs. Having

Curatorial text

The title of this exhibition comes from an earlier conversation. I had this discussion with Quentin last year, while we were leaving MoBU, searching for the core of his work, a body of research spanning at least fifteen years.

He names the central wound of modernity: a slow, systematic substitution. Existence gets replaced by accumulation. Life gets replaced by its image. The sacred gets replaced by its price. Quentin Hubert did not build an exhibition about this wound. He built one from it, and against it.

Press and links

• arte et facta, Quentin Hubert, Being vs. Having exhibition

Artist: Quentin Hubert
Organiser: Kulterra Art Gallery