Art

Mihai Grecu

Pictor · 1916–1998

One of the founders of modern Moldovan painting and of the higher school of fine arts in Chișinău. His works marked an entire generation of artists.

Mihai Grecu (b. 22 November 1916, Faraoani – d. 9 April 1998, Chișinău) was a painter of Bessarabian origin, considered the founder of modernism in Moldovan fine art and one of the founders of the National School of Painting. A complex and innovative personality, he revolutionised the fine arts in the Republic of Moldova, and in the former Soviet space as well, while remaining anchored in Romanian tradition.

His work

Mihai Grecu is the author of more than seventy paintings, many of them devoted to the history and the soul of the Moldovan people. A passionate colourist and a seeker of unusual harmonies, he experimented with techniques innovative for his time — collage, fluorescent paints, „metallic” effects — which gave him a distinct artistic voice. His work ranges from a rigorous classicism to an art of folkloric, naive inspiration, always marked by a profound poetic sensibility.

Legacy

Considered an innovator and a „complex and extremely talented personality”, Mihai Grecu, together with Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu, laid the foundations of higher education in the fine arts in Chișinău and trained generations of artists. For his work he was awarded the titles of Merited Artist and People's Painter of the Moldavian SSR, was a laureate of the State Prize and an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova.

In 1992 he received the highest distinction of the Republic of Moldova — the „Order of the Republic”. The year 2016 was declared in Moldova the „Mihai Grecu Year”, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, and his works, held at the National Art Museum of Moldova, continue to be a landmark of national art.

A pathbreaker

Mihai Grecu was a founding member of the Union of Fine Artists of Moldova and a central figure of artistic life in Chișinău for more than half a century. His works, shown at exhibitions across the Soviet Union and abroad, established a new aesthetic, freed from the canons of socialist realism. Through the boldness of his experiments and through his work as a teacher, he trained numerous artists and contributed decisively to the modernisation of national painting. His work remains a landmark of Moldovan artistic heritage.