Gabriel Catrinescu belongs to the generation of artists trained at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he studied under Gheorghe Șaru. He made his debute in 1964 at the Centenary Exhibition of the Institute organised by the National Museum of Art of Romania. From the 1970s onward, he maintained a consistant presence in both group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including in Berlin, Prague, Bratislava, Sofia, Athens, Munich, Hamburg, and Paris.

While his oeuvre encompasses traditional genres such as interior scenes and still life, his approach to landscape demonstrates a highly analytical pictorial vocabulary. He deconstructed observed reality into tonal structures and reconstructed it on canvas with chromatic refinement. This process was neither descriptive nor purely atmospheric; rather, it reflected an ordered perception aimed at articulating spatial relationships through subtle modulations of colour. Catribescu’s landscapes thus occupy a distictive place within Romanian post-war painting, bridging continuity with academic tradition while exibiting  an acute sensitivity to contemporary chromatic exploration.

Works by Catrinescu have entered public and private collections in Romania, France, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, the United States and Canada, a circulation that attests to the adaptability of his visual language within a broader European context. His art continues to be valued for its rigorous construction of pictorial space and the capacity of colour to generate vibrant, resonant atmospheres.