Ion Grigorescu

Ion Grigorescu was born in 1945 in Bucharest. A painter by training, he belongs to a generation of underground Romanian conceptual artists active during the dark years of Ceausescu’s regime. The dictator appointed «official» artists to sculpt numerous embellished and iconic self-celebratory statues to be paraded through the streets of Romania. Ceausescu also ordered the demolition of countless private citizens’ homes to build the People’s Palace, his own private mansion. As in most Soviet countries between the 1970s and 1980s, the arts in Romania were mainly subservient to the celebration of political leaders. Artists like Grigorescu, who dissented with the political agenda of the government, refused to put their work to the service of propaganda and did so through the ploy of immateriality. The anti-commercial and non-marketable nature of such works informed a subtly revolutionary poetics.

Artists like Grigorescu often operated undercover or through transgressive actions that could almost go unnoticed amid the apparently banal and common.
These actions were nevertheless carriers of clear socio-political critiques against the oppressive regimes with which artists were forced to cope.
Grigorescu’s works emerge from the artist’s personal experience, from the context in which he lived,from his surroundings in the city of Bucharest, and from his critique against the regime.