Ovidiu Maitec is recognized today as one of the most important Romanian sculptors after Brâncusi. Maitec’s pioneering work with patterns of perforations in wood set him apart from his contemporaries. While other artists of his generation, notably the representatives of American Minimalism, favoured the introduction of cold, industrial forms into sculpture, Maitec resisted this tendency and turned instead to the natural material of wood, to which he is said to have injected light. His works have been presented in many prestigious exhibitions and are held in public and private collections in Romania and abroad, including in the Romanian National Museum of Art, Bucharest; Tate Gallery, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Fond National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Venice Biennale; the Lennon Foundation, Cleveland; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; National Art Gallery of Romania, Bucharest; the Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim; Norrköping Museum of Art; Tyles Collection of Modern Art, University of Tasmania; Baunkunst Galerie, Cologne; Manufactures, Hanover; and many others. 

The work of Ovidiu Maitec is characterized by a delicate and living monumentality. Maitec's central medium of expression, wood, plays an extremely important role in the conceptual aspect of his art. Radar, with its semi-abstract forms that recall the shape of a large antenna, reveals a post-modern appropriation of the man-made object through the use of material derived from the natural world. Radar is a masterful example of Maitec’s small-scale woodcarvings, in which the symmetrical round perforations which characterise his technique are used to aerate and lend an inviting permeability to the solidity of the wood.