Florina Coulin
Florina Coulin is an artist whose presence and significance need to be brought into sharper focus. She belongs to a generation that benefitted from the wave of liberalization that swept through Romanian society from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, a period that coincided with her studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Soon after graduation, Coulin found herself surrounded by a circle of artists and friends that included Ion and Marica Grigorescu, her then-husband Matei Lăzărescu, and the physician and photographer Andrei Gheorghiu. Together, they shared the optimism engendered by the more
relaxed atmosphere and began experimenting with graphic, painterly, and photographic idioms that paid close attention to the fast-transforming reality of life in a socialist city. Coulin, for her part, found herself particularly drawn to lithography—which became almost indistinguishable from painting or drawing in her expert hands. Fragmenting and decomposing the picture plane, she not only exhibited a preoccupation (shared by her peers) with depicting “realograms” of the surrounding landscapes but also imbued her urban vistas with an unmistakably melancholic air. Parks and sites under construction are approached with a keen sense of observation, depicted according to photographs but “washed” in a haze that signals their fleeting and ephemeral nature, embedded as they are in both quotidian transience and poetic subjectivity. It is as if these early works were already anticipating their rapid transformation into memorial images, as Florina and her subsequent husband Georg Coulin soon found the political situation intolerable and decided to leave the country and settle in Germany. Following a period of readjustment, she continued her work with a focus on painting and watercolor, combining exploration of the rituals of daily life with a profound attachment to nature. It was soon after 1989, writing to Ruxandra Grigorescu about the personal and structural difficulties of forging a path as a woman artist, that she expressed her own credo—one that sidesteps any conventional career expectations and regards artmaking as an existential act: “Certainly, I set out from my experience as a woman who also wants to create art. To me, for a very long time and with greater or lesser awareness, the question of the meaning of art has arisen insofar as it affects life—in which case I merge the two. This is why I was doubtful as to the production of paintings and the system of exhibitions as it is practiced.” M.R.
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