Description

Overwhelming with his talent, Horia Damian began his journey into the visual arts world from an early age, his landscapes and still lifes in pencil and washes, created in his twenties, being only the beginning of a large-scale artistic journey. The artist, at first, borrowed and interpreted the works of great artists such as Rembrandt, Velasquez and Delacroix, in an attempt to shape his own style. The works made during the 1930s-40s are not as numerous as those made by Horia Damian after he arrived in Paris, but these define his incipient period, characterized by a particular naturalness, recognizable in the masters of the time. Horia Damian assumes the condition of creator as a formative and spiritual experience, which he lives in solitude, completely distancing himself from the trends that dominated the artistic scene during that period. The artist stated that "the architecture of the work is the key," which implicitly becomes the note on which he will shape his compositions. Damian was considered a true genius who assimilated a multitude of compositional information, painting with overwhelming simplicity still lifes and landscapes. Thus, the still life become, during the 1940s, the main subject of his work, this cycle including several works such as "Still Life", "Still Life with Apples", "Red Melon". All these works retain the same compositional pattern and are recognizable by their chromatic features and the elements that define the framework. In the present work, the chromatic palette is vibrant in shades of red-English, blue-gray and brown. The tone of the work is given by the main color mass, the red becoming the focal point of the work. The table is full of open items, suspended in expectation, which the viewer needs to discover.

Biography

Exhibition catalog "Horia Damian", National Museum of Contemporary Art, September-October 2009 VARIA, Radu, "Horia Damian. Works from Romanian museums and collections, 1930-1946", Monitorul Oficial Publishing House, Bucharest, 2009

Sizing

Width 110.5, Height 90.5

Dating

cca. 1945

Medium

oil on wood

Location

Artmark românia

Research information

The artwork is reproduced in the catalog "Horia Damian. Works from Romanian museums and collections", 1930-1946, Radu Varia, Official Monitor Publishing House, Bucharest, 2009, page 72, under the name "Still Life".