Medi Wechsler-Dinu

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Margareta Wechsler „Medi” Dinu was a Jewish Romanian artist who worked with painting and drawing. She studied at the Belle Arte Academy in Bucharest with painters Ipolit Strâmbu and Jean Alexandru Steriadi. Medi Dinu was an active member of the Balchik intellectual circles in the 1930s, and a close associate of many avantgarde figures–although, in her practice, she rejected avantgarde principles on a formal level. Throughout her youth, she was also a target of the antisemitic violence that marked Romanian politics at the time. Her intricate biography, especially her Balchik period, is explored in a fictionalized manner by the 2016 animation short The Blissful Accidental Death. Dinu’s work is remarkable for its capacity to capture the ephemeral and the momentary, in both her portraiture and plein air compositions. A sense of fragmentation, expressed through various spatial distortions in bright colors, evokes the fragility of all existence and one’s desire for protection and immersion. At present, Dinu’s works are part of numerous private collections in Romania and abroad–including in Bulgaria, France, and the United States –as well as public ones, such as that of the Art Museum in Constanța, The Metropolitan Library in Bucharest, or the Eminescu Memorial in Ipotești.