One Hour Tour, Five Decades of Romanian Art

It’s little wonder Bucharest’s first private art institution in over a century, the Museum of Recent Art (MARe), opened its doors in October 2018 to wide acclaim. Located in the exclusive Primăverii district, it’s a few blocks down from the main residence of former communist leaders Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu (now open as the Spring Palace Museum). With over 150 pieces, displayed in a new building covering 1200 sq m, MARe offers a unique perspective on the challenges Romanian artists faced during and after the communist regime. What a foreign visitor can find in Romanian art is, on one hand, a huge repository of official art of the communist regime, a sort of Disneyland of communist propaganda, and on the other an extremely rare element in contemporary international art – a profoundly religious, militant, even mystical art, which proceeds from the canonical symbolism of the Prolog group (established in 1985, still active nowadays) to the unconventional ultra-orthodoxism of Marian Zidaru.
And then there is the pop-art work of Ion Bârlădeanu, whose collages were the subject of an HBO documentary film that won the Emmy Award.