Marin Gherasim was a central figure in Romanian post-war painting, whose work united structural rigour with a metaphysical reflection on memory and sacred space. Educated at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he later taught, he was also active as an art historian at the Institute of Art History of the Romanian Academy. His long academic career shaped several generations of artists, while his painting evolved through a series of conceptual cycles - Proteic, Urban, The Road, The Gates, The Apses, Memory of the Apse and Reconstruction of the Apse.

Gherasim’s art stemmed from a sustained meditation on architecture and spirituality, seeking to rebuild, through painting, a moral and symbolic edifice. The apse, recurrent in his oeuvre, became an archetype of elevation and communion, a metaphor for the endurance of the sacred within a desacralised world. Alongside it, the motif of the shield emerged as a visual metaphor for defence and inner resistance, translating the spiritual tension of preservation into a compositional structure of equilibrium and restraint. His chromatic language shifted from early expressionist inflections towards a disciplined geometry of form and light, in which texture and matter acquired a near-liturgical resonance.

Throughout his career, Gherasim exhibited widely in Romania and abroad - at the Dalles Hall, the National Museum of Art, and later in Vienna, Athens, London and Paris -receiving numerous distinctions, including the Caravaggio Prize in Rome and the Order of the Star of Romania. His works are held in major public collections, from the National Museum of Art of Romania to museums in Szczecin, Sofia and the Vatican.

A persistent concern with reconstruction - spiritual as much as artistic - defines Gherasim’s legacy. His pictorial universe, at once austere and radiant, transcends narrative and becomes a meditation on fragility, endurance and the possibility of renewal through art.