HORIA BERNEA (ROMANIAN 1938-2000)
TRIPTYCH 5 - 1980
Signed and monogrammed lower edge, inscribed ‘5’ and dated, oil on canvas
35.5cm x 35.5cm (14in x 14in), unframed
Horia Bernea was one of the most famous Romanian artists of the twentieth century, considered one of the most important to have emerged from the vanguard of the late 60's. According to historian Dr Alex Popescu, “(Bernea) was born into a family of intellectuals; his father had studied with Heidegger and Dimitrie Gusti…. Bernea was inspired by an inter-disciplinary spirit of sociological research…. He painted in cycles, focusing on a single, often domestic, object (e.g. ‘Food’, ‘Apples’, ‘Window’, ‘Hill’), painting them again and again, seeing them as in a contemplative distance.”By the 1980s Bernea was a well-established international artist. He was awarded the Francois Stahly Bursary at the 1971 Paris Biennale and a Romanian Academy prize in 1978; in 1976 his work was the subject of a film presented at a UNESCO conference in Baghdad. His exhibitions included the 1978 and 1980 Venice Biennales; he also exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and received positive reviews for his solo exhibitions in London, Liverpool and Newcastle.Between 1990 and 2000, he was director of Museul Țăranului Român ('The Museum of the Romanian Peasant'), an institution that received the "European Museum of the Year" award in 1996.