“The Diaphanous Thing/Lucrul diafan” exhibition, presented by the Ilfoveanu & Badea Cultural Foundation, between October 15 and December 15, 2024, brought together paintings and photographs, significant landmarks for the practice of the artist Ion Dumitriu in the 70s-90s. The series is the factor that orders this project: the accumulation over time of some images dedicated to the same motives is the narrative thread of a singular reflection about copying and re-imagining reality, about correspondences between what and how we see, between knowing some objects, which Ion Dumitriu occupy with an almost monographic interest, and their ability to appear, again, with the intensity of an interjection.

The exhibition includes segments from several representative cycles, paintings in which Ion Dumitriu returns to landscape motifs, agricultural tools, and fruits of the earth, as well as the elements of rural architecture for which he is generally known. All these cycles of works have their origin in the work at Poiana Mărului, where Ion Dumitriu painted every summer between 1971 and 1991 with Horia Bernea, Teodor Moraru, Teodor Rusu, Șerban Epure and other artists. Magda Cârneci summarizes the program of this group as an “opposition to the didactic-illustrative realism of the 50s, but also to modernized realism, aesthetically seasoned with neo-avant-garde elements, proposing to recover the banal, as such, unadulterated, in all its variety his multiform”.

Ion Dumitriu (Galați, 1943 – Bucharest, 1998) graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts “Nicolae Grigorescu” (today the University of Arts), Bucharest. He worked as a drawing-painting teacher at the “Nicolae Tonitza” High School in Bucharest and was a member of the Plastic Artists Union starting in 1975; between 1991 and 1993, he was the vice-president of the Plastic Artists Union.

The Foundation’s visiting hours are Monday – Friday: 10:00 – 19:00, Saturday: 10:00 – 17:00
Address: str. Armand Călinescu, No. 2, Pitesti.