Born on May 19, 1934, in Sibiu, artist Doina C. Hordovan, studied at the Institute of Fine Arts “Nicolae Grigorescu” between 1952 and 1958. She participated in all the commemorative and festive county exhibitions organized by the U.A.P. Cluj Branch.  Its debut exhibition took place in Cluj-Napoca in 1963. The artist passed away in 2012 at the age of 72. Some of her works can be seen at the Museum of Art in Cluj, in the Decorative Art Collection. The artist also managed to appear in Romanian exhibitions abroad, such as the Cluj Branch Exhibition in Yugoslavia, Italy and Germany.

Little known to the contemporary public, Doina Hordovan Ciato is the author of several monumental art ensembles, but she is above all an artist capable of a particular visual refinement, which charms especially in her pictorial works and watercolours. Formed in a cultural environment in which the ideas and motifs of socialist realism, the interwar avant-gardes (especially surrealism) and american abstract expressionism, received in Eastern Europe in particular and partial ways, were eclectically and often contradictory, the artist from Cluj achieves compositional formulations in which the surrealist vein and fantasy subtly combine with a sophisticated aestheticism, with technical skill, metaphorical insertions and even a spiritual touch. Her still lifes, in particular, become pretexts both for elegant formal explorations and for concomitantly intimate introspection with archetypal suggestion.