CURRENT AUCTION

This season’s auction presents the diverse strategies through which Romanian artists have confronted, interpreted, and reimagined reality in recent decades. The selection brings together distinct generations whose works mediate between personal experience and collective consciousness, translating social, political, and emotional dimensions into image and form.

At its core stands Ion Țuculescu, whose painting encapsulates a vital tension between expression and structure. His visual vocabulary - oscillating between abstraction, organic rhythm, and chromatic intensity drawn from vernacular motifs - continues to exemplify an autonomous creative model situated at the margins of academic modernism.

Within the same lineage of subjective vision, Ecaterina Vrana constructs an interior theatre where irony, vulnerability, and excess coexist. Her figures, poised between dream and performance, transform the everyday into a stage of emotional exposure. In dialogue with her, Geta Brătescu’s Pre-Medean Forms revisits myth through conceptual reduction, transforming the narrative of origin into a meditation on creation and identity.

Corneliu Baba’s Still Life, after Rembrandt and his self-portrait extend the reflection on artistic legacy and interpretation. Reworking the Dutch master’s Slaughtered Ox, Baba exposes painting as both homage and critique - a lucid meditation on mortality and representation itself.

Constantin Piliuță and Marin Gherasim follow parallel paths within the figurative tradition, each redefining its premises: Piliuță through an economy of line and psychological precision, Gherasim through a metaphysical architecture of colour and silence.

The selection also includes artists whose practice shaped the contemporary visual field of Cluj. Corneliu Brudașcu’s luminous realism, Alin Bozbiciu’s psychological figuration, and Mircea But’s analytical compositions reveal how the “Cluj School” integrated memory, corporeality, and socio-cultural critique into a renewed pictorial idiom. Generational continuities emerge in Harry Guttman’s allegorical narratives and Christian Paraschiv’s experimental works that fuse body, medium, and sign.

Through these converging voices, Contemporary Realities outlines an image of Romanian art that is neither uniform nor nostalgic. The works on view suggest that to represent the present is to negotiate it - across myth and media, memory and critique. Together, they compose a coherent cartography of artistic thought in which reality is not reproduced but reconsidered as a mutable and deeply personal construction.