Gizella Popescu’s exhibition Inner Garden invites viewers on a journey into a personal territory where the boundaries between human and animal, instinct and convention, real and imaginary dissolve. The works construct a symbolic universe in which otherness becomes a mirror and identity turns into a continuous play of masks. The characters, with their direct and unsettling gazes, are not mere portraits but embodiments of psychological states and collective archetypes. Alongside them, monkeys appear as partners, witnesses, or ironic doubles, destabilizing the hierarchies between species and questioning our fragile position as the so-called “center” of the world. The lush vegetation, the painted jungle, the imagined garden do not represent a paradise, but a space of inner tension: the place where repressed instinct meets social convention, where masquerade and ritual merge with pictorial theatricality. Through the dialogue between canvas and object, between image and mask, Inner Garden becomes a scenography of introspection and identity play. The viewer is invited not merely to contemplate, but to step into their own “inner garden,” with all the masks, contradictions, and instincts that inhabit it.