Paul Neagu

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Paul Neagu’s practice occupies a distinct position within postwar European art, moving between drawing, sculpture, performance, poetry and theoretical writing. Trained at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, he left Romania for Britain at the beginning of the 1970s and developed an artistic language grounded in the body as a thinking and sensing structure. His early concern with palpable art challenged the primacy of vision, asking the viewer to understand the work through touch, movement and embodied perception. This investigation later expanded into a complex vocabulary of cellular forms, diagrams, ritual actions and modular structures. Neagu treated the human body as a living tissue, composed of interdependent parts and connected to wider social and cosmic orders. In 1972, he founded the fictional Generative Art Group, a collective of invented artistic identities through which he explored the relation between fragment and whole, individual gesture and shared authorship. Central to this system was the Hyphen, conceived less as a single sculptural object than as a generative structure. Initially developed as a three dimensional support capable of holding things together, the Hyphen became a bridge between separation and union, matter and idea, object and body. Its tripod form condensed Neagu’s interest in balance, transition and connection, translating instinct, rationality and spirituality into a compact sculptural vocabulary. Settled in London, Neagu exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Serpentine Gallery, while also teaching at Hornsey College of Art, Chelsea School of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art. His work remains marked by a sustained tension between physical experience and abstract construction, positioning sculpture as process, diagram and embodied thought.