Romanian catalog for Webpage - Flipbook - Page 21
Șerban Savu,
Girl in Green (detail),
2013, illustrated page
124
going to church on Sunday in Romania and across Europe.
In one of the predella panels, a girl is depicted standing
by the side of the road. She might be waiting for a bus,
but more likely she is a prostitute on the lookout for a
passing car or truck driver.
Savu is not judgmental as he clearly empathizes with
his subjects and understands a longing for a former
life increasingly at odds with our contemporary world.
The artist’s practice is rooted in nineteenth-century
realism, yet Savu has deliberately shied away from the
monumental treatment that past art often afforded
manual labor. His is no straightforward documentation of
reality; it is an insight into life after utopia.
The painter Roman Tolici’s One Bench (2007) takes a
more lighthearted approach in depicting everyday life
with a father spending time in the park with his daughter.
The artist presents four scenes in one, thus creating a
narrative of the pair’s attempts to pluck up the courage
to climb up and balance on the back of a park bench.
Poignantly, the image shows that, with enough will and
imagination, spontaneous fun can still be had without
technology or organized activity.
generation of followers. The artist encouraged his
“master class” students — who would come independently
from the university to visit his studio — to be brave and
independent in their thinking and working. As a gay man,
only able to come out after communism ended, Brudaşcu
had to hide his sexuality throughout his youth and into
middle age. In the painting Untitled (Self Portrait) (201920), we sense his pain and frustration in his depiction of
the three ages of man: as a boy, in midlife, and in old age.
Adrian Ghenie first captured the imagination of the art
world with oblique references to the 1989 revolution in
Romania and the resulting Christmas Day execution of
Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. He went on to paint the
collector series depicting Hermann Göring surrounded
by looted art. His subjects have varied from Elvis Presley,
Vincent van Gogh, and Charles Darwin to Josef Mengele
and Joseph Stalin. Ghenie has never shied away from
tackling important, world-changing events, nor the big
personalities who dramatically influenced the course
of history, whether for good or ill. One of the most
prominent Romanian painters working today, Ghenie’s
dynamic and evolving style has helped to destroy the
myth that abounded in the early years of this century that
figurative painting was dead. Instead, Ghenie has proven
that new technologies inform and enhance the plastic
nature of the medium, enabling contemporary painters
to far exceed the imaginings of their predecessors.
From their studios, artists today can develop and plan
compositions on software programs or search online for
an almost limitless supply of imagery — innovations that
have invigorated the medium and inspired painters anew.
Adrian Ghenie,
Doctor Josef 2
(detail), 2011,
illustrated page 70
The hero and antihero dominate the subject matter of
many Romanian artists’ works. Such is the case with
Cornel Brudaşcu. One of the few Romanian artists to
also be associated with Pop art in the 1970s, Brudaşcu
is recognized predominantly for his painterly and
even poetic works that depict the male figure. Heavily
influenced by artists such as El Greco from the Spanish
Renaissance, Brudaşcu’s lively, fluid style inspired a
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