When Mihai Nicodim opened his first Los Angeles gallery in 2006, Romania was never far from his heart or his eye. Nicodim’s early program was built around the likes of Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Mureşan, and Șerban Savu, fellow countrymen who shared Nicodim’s desire to reassess contemporary art history from an outsider's perspective and challenge its established framework. Collectors, institutions, and the discerning public noticed, and before long, Nicodim had placed works in collections such as LACMA, MoCA, SFMoMA, and Denver Art Museum, allowing artists such as the aforementioned Romanians and other free radicals like Michiel Ceulers, Oscar Murillo, Daniel Pitín, and Hugo Wilson’s careers to gain traction Stateside. The young Nicodim Gallery’s success constructed the platform on which the program was able to expand eastward to Bucharest in 2014, the city in which Mihai was born and raised.

Since opening its doors, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest has thrived in luring the most adventurous voices in contemporary art to the east, confronting, confusing, and collaborating with Romania’s hard-set artistic ideologies. The programming has been site-specific and world class: Galeria Nicodim has enabled international artists such as Marina Abromovich, Dominique Fung, Devin B. Johnson, Mike Kelley, Douglas Gordon, Kris Lemsalu, Simphiwe Ndzube, Katja Novitskova, Katherina Olschbaur, Jorge Peris, Mandy El-Sayegh, Max Hooper Schneider, Moffat Takadiwa, Anna Uddenberg, and Zhou Yilun to commingle with local luminaries like Razvan Boar, Teodor Graur, Daniela Palimariu, Cristian Răduță, Ecaterina Vrana, and Marian Zidaru on level footing. Group exhibitions like TRANS WORLD, 2019, have been aggressively subversive—it established a literal backchannel line of communication between Bucharest and Los Angeles that transcended language and culture—while solo and two-person exhibitions like Rae Klein: Last Night I Dreamt I Was Running, 2023, Dominique Fung and Katherina Olschbaur: My Kingdom and A Horse, 2021, Devin B. Johnson: Long Walk, 2021, and Mandy El-Sayegh: Taking Part, 2017 carried a global spotlight to the city.