Petru Lucaci (b. 1956, Arad) is a prominent contemporary artist from Romania whose work spans many media such as painting, graphics, photography, object-based art, and happenings. He has served as the president of the Visual Artists’ Union of Romania, as head of the locally esteemed ARTA Magazine, being at the same time a professor of painting at the National University of Arts, Bucharest.

Lucaci’s paintings stress the medium’s materiality, as well as the performativity of the painterly act itself through techniques of auto-reproduction and deconstruction of motifs that he previously engaged with. His approach to abstraction highlights the subtlety of emotion and the uncertainty of memory, not only through his selective employment of colour or intermeshing of techniques, but also through the act of naming. In works such as Memory of a Portrait or Sacrifice III, the artist poignantly materialises a critique of the relation between reality and representation in art in which subjectivity takes precedence.

Lucaci’s works have been exhibited widely in Romania as well as abroad in France, Japan, Belgium, Denmark, and Hungary. His works are part of important public collections such as that of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest, alongside private ones. Lucaci has been awarded multiple national prizes that mark his exceptional artistic achievements.