Francisc Șirato

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Francisc Șirato, alongside Nicolae Tonitza, Ștefan Dimitrescu and Oscar Han, was one of the members of the “Group of Four’’. Coming from a family of French bourgeois, he is considered to be an important figure in Romanian art. Despite the fact that he went to Düsseldorf to study, he couldn’t attend the Academy of Arts due to financial problems and decided to work at an engraving studio as an apprentice. He returned to Romania with excellent drawing skills and a rich experience. He exhibited for the first time in 1907 at the Official Salon, where he was immediately on the radar of art critics, colleagues and collectors. With an intense exhibition activity, Șirato became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest and won prizes at group exhibitions organised in Brussels, Barcelona, Paris and New York. Particularly interested in composition, Șirato sought throughout his career a certain transformative light, that came from the intensity of the paint and the contrasting colours altogether. Even if we can observe in his works the influences of post-impressionists, avant-garde and even from Cézanne, Șirato is showing his own personality through the representation of reality.