Magda Predescu

The painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country's isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceau?escu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and S o Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.

Mihai Olos (b. Arini?, Romania, 1940; d. Endingen am Kaiserstuhl, 2015) ranks among the most fascinating artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His adaptations of the formal vocabulary pioneered by Constantin Br ncu?i are unrivaled in their creative originality. His works evince an utterly novel approach to the combination of materials from the culture of rural Romania with the visual strategies of modernism. His formidable oeuvre engages with conceptual and minimal art and comprises paintings, drawings, and sculptures, sometimes in the dimensions of land-art projects, as well as performances and poetry. Despite the constraints imposed by the communist system, his art and travels-- during which he also met his kindred spirit Joseph Beuys-- were dedicated to the unerring pursuit of his vision of social sculpture and radical utopian architecture.