CategoriesStyles and Movements
Cluj School
Figurative painters trained in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca who came to international attention in the 2000s.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Cluj-Napoca, in Transylvania, is home to one of Romania's main art universities, and after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989 its painting department kept a strong tradition of drawing, anatomy and oil technique. A generation of students born in the 1970s and early 1980s combined that training with material from photographs, film stills and the country's recent past.
Their pictures are mostly figurative and often muted: greys, browns and deep greens, lit as if at dusk. Adrian Ghenie smears and drags paint across scenes drawn from 20th-century history. Șerban Savu paints small figures resting or idling among apartment blocks and socialist-era landscapes. Marius Bercea sets modernist buildings in hazy, overgrown settings, while Victor Man makes dark, enigmatic figures and still lifes. Ciprian Mureșan works more conceptually, in drawing and video. In 2009 artists and organisers opened a shared workspace in a former paintbrush factory, giving the scene a centre.