The Paintings of Cornel Brudașcu

Born in the Sălaj County village of Tusa in 1937, Cornel Brudașcu is a Romanian painter who began his career under the his country’s former Communist regime of the 1960s. He studied painting at the Universitatea de Artă şi Design in the north-western city of Cluj-Napoca. Over the course of his career, Brudașcu’s work gradually progressed into gestural  compositions that melded figurative forms with abstraction.

After his university graduation in 1962, Brudașcu began to establish an impressive body of work. However, while there were opportunities for exhibitions in the 1960s, there was no established art market in Romania. In the 1970s, the only decade in which the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu allowed cultural exchange with the West, Brudașcu and other artists became acquainted with contemporary American art through Western magazines, reading rooms, and informal networks. Publications, such as Germany’s “Popcorn” and London’s “Oz”, offered images of counter-culture music and art movements beyond the Iron Curtain. 

As a member of Romania’s 1970s avant-garde painters, Brudașcu experimented with solarized photography and created a series of Pop Art paintings, photo- based portraits of friends as well as  figures appropriated from magazines. These works gained him international recognition in 2015 due to their inclusion at the Tate Modern’s “The World Goes Pop” in London. Both the Centre Pompidou and Musee d’Art Moderne at the Ville de Paris have works from this series in their collections. 

Following his Pop Art images, Cornel Brudașcu made a radical shift away from his previous work. This change was the result of new visual elements and a more personal approach to his paintings’ themes and genres. At unspecified times over a period of fifteen years, Brudașcu created a collection of simple graphic sketches and small, untitled paintings with dark burgundy hues. He interwove those works with male figurative paintings of a post-impressionist style that were tinged with a distinct homoeroticism. This painterly series of figurative works bear witness through their dream-like compositions to his slow, poetic journey of gay affirmation.

As with many other Romanian artists, the subject of hero and anti-hero is a dominate theme in Brudașcu’s paintings. Influenced heavily by the works of El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) who reached his artistic maturity in Spain, Brudașcu’s fluid expressionist style inspired the many master-class students who attended his studio to be independent in their thinking and work. Throughout his career, Brudașcu’s oeuvre has maintained a balance of intimacy and cultural commentary that has united local Romanian histories with broader art movements. 

Cornel Brudașcu has continued to exhibit his work since 2005. Among his solo exhibitions were shows at Galeria Plan B in Berlin, the VNH Gallery in Paris and Spatiu Intact in Cluj, Romania. His paintings have been presented in group exhibitions in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Bucharest, New York, Ostrava, and Leipzig, among others. Brudașcu continues to live and work in Cluj-Napoca as a teacher at the internationally renowned Fine Arts School of Cluj.   

Notes: Galleria Plan B has a biography and a selection of Cornel Brudașcu’s work at its website: https://www.plan-b.ro

The online Frieze Magazine has an article on Cornel Brudașcu by art and culture writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen at its site: https://www.frieze.com/article/cornel-brudascu

A second article on Cornel Brudașcu by Kristian Madsen, that includes several images from various stages of his work, is located at The Clavert Journal site: https://www.plan-b.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cornel-Brudascu-The-Calvert-Journal-2017.pdf

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Cornel Brudascu”, Color Print, The Calvert Journal 2017, United Kingdom

Second Insert Image: Cornel Brudașcu, Untitled (Faces on Red Field), 2024, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 40 cm, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Cornel Brudascu, Untitled (Figure/Blue Lines), 2019, Oil on Canvas, 51.8 x 47.9 cm, Allison Jacques Gallery, London