Horia Damian was a Romanian post-war contemporary painter, sculptor, and architect. His early painting consisted of abstract geometrical compositions in pale, delicate colours, and were done most frequently in oil and resin. By the end of the 1950’s, his painting had taken on a gestural quality. In the 1960’s, Damian suddenly changed his technique entirely with the construction of a wooden relief pyramid. From then on, his artistic practice was dominated by experimentations with architecture, while formally his works became more three-dimensional and monumental. His canvases are often organised in iconographic cycles, which take archetypal architectural elements—such as gates, temples, pyramids, capitals, and pediments—as their focus. Damian's pieces have been part of many exhibitions and collections around the world, including in the National Museum of Art, Bucharest; the Musée Fabre, Montpellier; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Venice Biennale; documenta, Kassel; the Grand Palais, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Neue Galerie, Aachen; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Bridgestone Museum, Tokyo; and the Leo Castelli Gallery.

During Damian’s time in Paris, he experimented with naturalistic and cubist forms to develop a wholly original abstract style, which is evident in Mastaba. The work’s evocation of futurism comes through an uninhibited view on architecture that uses dynamic lines and sharp contrasts. Damian created an idiosyncratic world in this piece, with structures painted in a monochrome landscape that are reminiscent of early architecture and at the same time of an abandoned futurist and dystopian environment devoid of human occupants. Damian’s formation as an architect is evident in works like this one through the extraordinary rigor of the drawing.