Vasile Kazar

Vasile Kazar (30 July 30, 1913, Sighet - March 21, 1998) was a graphic artist, draughtsman, and illustrator, one of the most important Romanian contemporary artists.

Vasile Kazar was born into a wealthy family of Hebrew intellectuals, which allowed him after graduating high school in his hometown to continue his studies in Baia Mare, Budapest, and at the Academie Grande Chaumière in Paris. He began his career by providing illustrations in the early 1930s for such left-wing magazines as Stânga and Cuvântul liber. In 1932 he had a one-man exhibition in Cluj, and in 1937 he published in Oradea the album Pita de mălai (Corn bread), which includes 12 drawings of the peasant life of Maramureş; these were dramatically detailed, showing the influences of Pieter Bruegel I and of Japanese prints - works that will be exhibited next year to the Contemporary Art Galleries in Paris. In 1944, he was deported to a Nazi concentration camps where he lose parents. Holocaust survivor, from 1950 until 1976 he was a lecturer, then professor at the Department of Graphic Arts of the Institute "Nicolae Grigorescu" in Bucharest.

Vasile Kazar brings to his work one of the most authentic testimony about a dramatic destiny assumed lucidly. From the late 1940s until c. 1958 he tried to conform to the aesthetic and ideological precepts of Socialist Realism, but in the early 1960s he reverted to the expressionism that had characterized his work of 1945-7, producing drawings that displayed a dreamlike touch in their scratchy line and biomorph imagery. He developed this style in the 1970s and 1980s in such series of drawings as Apparitions at the Old Court and From my Bestiary. He subsequently evolved a very subtle use of color, which became much harsher. He leaved behind a valuable work that includes cycles of illustrations, such as those for "Duin elegies. Sonnets to Orpheus" by Reiner Maria Rilke, "The Old Court Kings" by Mateiu Caragiale or for the poems of Catullus, hundreds of drawings which are the pride of private galleries and collections around the world. In 1992 Kazar donated 103 drawings, 7 prints and 6 sketchbooks to the Museum of Art in Bucharest. He left by legacy a small museum in a house of the eighteenth century, with antiques and textiles, in Vadu Izei, Maramureş, which became today a Memorial Museum.

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Geta Brătescu

Geta Brătescu (b. 1926, Ploieşti) - is a visual artist from Romania, leading figure of contemporary arts. His work includes graphic art, drawing, collage, photography, video and book illustration.

Geta Brătescu studied at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest between 1945-1949, with George Călinescu and Tudor Vianu, and at the Institute of Arts "Nicolae Grigorescu" Bucharest between 1969-1971. She started art studies in 1945 at the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of master Camil Ressu, but she was forced to discontinue because of communist censorship.

Distinct presence in the Romanian contemporary art, complete artist who chooses as a means of expression such as traditional media and new, Geta Brătescu done graphics work, engraving, drawing and fabric collage, tapestry, object, action photography, video. She exposed his works in collective or personal exhibitions in famous art galleries around the world (in Bucharest, Rome, Hamburg, Vienna, Liverpool, Missouri, Lausanne, Belgrade, Sao Paolo, Fredrikstad, Dessau, Bonn, Ljubljana, Graz). Geta Brătescu received many national and international awards, and in 2008 she received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, given for outstanding contribution to the development of contemporary Romanian art. Also, Geta Brătescu is artistic director of literature and art magazine "20/21 Century".

Geta Brătescu is caught in a contradictory move, developing artificiality and at the same time acknowledging its inevitability. Revealing for that are the objects with her face like a mask, increasing or decreasing the presence of artifice. High examples of his image features are combined with materials of everyday life, building composite objects that are assembled in collages often with humor, seeking the participation of the viewer. She goes from serious to humorous, off-hand the serious fantasy and whimsy, the conceptual rigor to the unstoppable inventiveness.

Geta Brătescu is regarded as one of the most remarkable personalities of Romanian post-war avantgarde art. With a background in literature and philosophy studies, pursued in parallel with those in art, Geta Brătescu’s artistic practice began in the heterogeneous and provocative intellectual environment of the 1940s and 1950s and has passed through the political upheaval of Socialism in Romania and its successive collapse at the end of the year 1989. The fact that the artist has experienced these social and cultural turns is an essential factor in understanding her recurrent appeal to particular forms of artistic expression.

Photos from Ivan Gallery