- 13 January 2023
- Tags IRCCU Venetia Expozitie Ioan Dreptu Muzeul de Arta Recenta
Institutul Român de Cultură și Cercetare Umanistică de la Veneția and Muzeul de Artă Recentă organize, between January 13-31, 2023, the painting exhibition Saga of the Solitary Painter. Ioan Dreptu | Curator: Erwin Kessler.
Opening: Friday, January 13, 2023, 16:00-19:00.
The gallery will be open to the public from Sunday to Friday from 10:00-12:00 and 16:00-19:00.
”Ioan Dreptu (1944–2008) studied painting between 1963–1969 at the Fine Arts Institute “Nicolae Grigorescu”, Bucharest. His mastery on realist representation could have made him into a successful artist of the communist regime. Instead, his artistic practice went against the official propaganda. He focused on public commissions of mural painting in churches from the villages of Robaia (Călimănești) and Copalnic-Mănăștur (Maramureș), which he painted dutifully from 1970 until 1989. On top of the ensuing isolation, his artistic marginality grew more through his private, surrealist artistic idiom. Prior to 1989, Ioan Dreptu’s works were among the very few instances of revolt in Romanian art, featuring a decapitated Stalin, barbed wire fences, torture tables, prosthetics, hammer and sickle, a decomposing, irradiated Saint George killing trivial dragons etc. It is an entire gallery of contorted symbolical shapes, with their corresponding codes, which, despite a certain mannerist sarcasm and elitist nostalgia, manages to emanate a clear scream of protest.”
(Erwin Kessler)
