Georges Mazilu: A Survey of Paintings and Drawings
Romania’s history is cloaked in mystery, but it possesses an art history that is rich and beautiful. Golden icon paintings and ornate monasteries grace the countryside. Consequently, artistic training in Romania is highly rigorous, with 9 years of schooling. The first four years focus on the human figure; the last five years focus on a specific media of choice. Georges Mazilu was trained as a realist, portraying the human figure. After mastering realism, Mazilu became an abstract painter. For several years, his works were purely abstract assemblages, based on the patterns of his upbringing with a tailor parent. The patterning is obvious in Mazilu’s blend of abstraction with realism, creating final forms somewhat anthropomorphic. Today, Mazilu’s paintings display perfectly blended fusions of abstraction and stunning realism. He combines his magical realist style with the European Old Master palette, creating a masterful fusion of old world and dream world.
Noted art historian and Professor Emeritus of Princeton University, Sam Hunter, wrote the most recent monograph on Mazilu, but the late, preeminent South African writer André Brink described Mazilu’s work most poetically:
“Mazilu’s originality, even when he mockingly inserts himself in an admirable and exciting tradition, lies in moving beyond what has been done, in painting precisely what Bosch or Redon or Dali have not imagined. This is the challenge to which each picture responds, each constituting a ludic leap of the imagination, or of faith, into the dark of the as yet unimaginable: it is this motion towards ‘something beyond,’ this act of ‘crossing over,’ of defying limits and boundaries, that defines the…dynamism, of an art that dazzles as much through its technical virtuosity as the subtlety and outrage of its imagination.”
Opening Reception Friday, September 15, 2017 from 5 to 7pm
[n.b. that this event takes place in Santa Fe]