The event exhibition "Nicolae Grigorescu - painter of the Romanian ethos" opens the Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024-2025 at the National Museum in Gdańsk
The Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024-2025 will be inaugurated in Poland with the event exhibition "Nicolae Grigorescu - painter of Romanian ethos" which will open at the National Museum in Gdańsk on July 27, 2024.
The exhibition is organized by the National Museum of Art of Romania (NMAR) and includes 44 paintings from its collections as well as 49 folk art objects from the National Village Museum "Dimitrie Gusti". Curators: Călin Stegerean, Director General of NMAR and Miruna Moraru, museographer.
On behalf of the "Dimitrie Gusti" National Village Museum the exhibition benefited from the collaboration of conf. dr. Paula Popoiu - manager, dr. Georgiana Onoiu - head of the Cultural Heritage Section, dr. Aurelia Tudor - scientific researcher.
The exhibition aims to present works created at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a period when national specificity was defined. Predominantly, reflections of the rural world were associated, whether they were peasant creations and traditions, peasant costumes and portraits or spirituality.
Grigorescu represented them in a manner detached from academic practices, using modern artistic means such as fragmented brushstrokes, an extended palette of grays, the capture of dazzling light effects and a synthetic construction of forms.
The exhibition is conceptually centered on the work "Girl and Her Dowry", made in 1895, on the one hand expressing the material and spiritual wealth of the village community and on the other hand symbolizing the intergenerational passage through which the "dowry" of the community is communicated to new generations, offering the comfort of a continuity of values. Some of the folk art objects borrowed from the "Dimitrie Gusti" National Village Museum provide a spectacular representation of the setting for this work, complemented by six folk costumes in keeping with the costumes of the characters painted by Grigorescu.
Exhibited for the first time in Poland, Nicolae Grigorescu's works mediate access to an important part of our cultural history and illustrate the passage of Romanian painting towards artistic modernity in terms of conception and artistic means.
For the entire duration of the exhibition (27 July - 27 October 2024), there will be a program of related activities addressed to a wide audience, organized in collaboration with the National Museum in Gdańsk and the Romanian Cultural Institute in Warsaw.
It starts on July 28 at 16.00 with a lecture entitled "Why do we still love Grigorescu?" by Călin Stegerean.
"The first exhibition of works by our national painter in Poland brings with it part of the image of Romanian landscapes, of our villages and peasants as they once were. Representing an important chapter in our cultural history, Nicolae Grigorescu's works convey in a vivid and moving way a certain Romanian spirit that deserves to be known in other cultural spaces. Thus, Grigorescu remains one of our most eloquent and beloved ambassadors," says Călin Stegerean, Director General of MNAR.
In the following months, there will be sewing and embroidery workshops inspired by the popular costumes, as they appear in Nicolae Grigorescu's paintings; a cooking workshop inspired by Romanian cuisine, a lecture on Romanian rural architecture, a lecture on Romanian folklore and legends, painting and dance workshops, Oana Cătălina Chițu Band concert, guided tours of the exhibition in sign language, in English, etc. The varied program of cultural mediation aims to attract the interest of the local public, with different ages and interests, in Grigorescu's work and Romanian culture.
Nicolae Grigorescu was born in 1838 in Pitaru village, in Muntenia region, and from the age of ten he became an assistant to painter Anton Chladek. He continued as a church painter until 1861 when he began his studies at the Academy of Art in Paris with the suport of a Romanian state scholarship. From 1863 he joined the Barbizon group of artists, discovering plein air painting and subjects related to the life of ordinary people, spending more than 30 years in France, on and off. In 1877 he was called invited to document the Romanian War of Independence. In 1890 he settled in Câmpina, where he died in 1907.
His work dedicated to the world of the Romanian village, his prodigious talent that reconciled local painting with European modernity, his immense popularity among the general public lead to his being considered our national painter.
The Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024 - 2025 is organized by the Romanian Ministry of Culture and the Romanian Cultural Institute through its representative office in Warsaw, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, in partnership with the Polish Institute in Bucharest.
