City Landscape
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- City Landscape
- Marica la Piatra Neamț
- 1976
- oil on photographic paper
- 40 x 60 cm
Although Ion Grigorescu’s work has had to do mostly with performance and with the media of photography and film, the 1970s saw the influences of Pop Art, photorealism, and hyper-realism emerge; these originally U.S. tendencies had been accessible to the Romanian art world since the politically more liberal period of the late 1960s. Grigorescu’s photo collages still take the photographic medium as their starting point, but transform the employed photos into hyper-realist scenes of painterly gestalt. The artist’s primary concern here is the extension of the body to inhabit a wider social context, even if the content of the images refers to ordinary domestic scenes or sports. The color palette with which Grigorescu worked here stands in stark contrast to the rest of his oeuvre, which is primarily in black and white. His color collages can be seen as subliminal critiques of 1950s Socialist Realism, and they also hint slightly at the new artistic parameters that were taking hold among the more radically inclined artists at the time. W.S.