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Ovidiu Maitec 100: Portrait of the Artist in a Century

Marking the centennial of the birth of the sculptor whom Mircea Eliade called the most powerful spiritual heir of Brâncuși, the exhibition Ovidiu Maitec 100 brings, for the first time at the Brukenthal National Museum, a representative selection of works from Romanian museum collections, the artist’s family, and private collections. The exhibition stands as a symbolic attempt to restore the wholeness of Ovidiu Maitec’s oeuvre, following the devastating fire that consumed his studio during the 1989 Revolution.

Born in 1925 in Arad, Maitec graduated from the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1950. He would later identify his true artistic debut a decade later, after several travels which, he confessed, taught him how to see. It was then that he carved his first nonfigurative sculpture - a perforated piece of wood, somewhere between a wall, a gate, and a bird - that marked a decisive technical turning point, allowing him, as Eliade wrote after meeting the artist in Paris in 1977, to bring light into wood.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Maitec achieved an unexpected international trajectory for an artist from behind the Iron Curtain, at a time when Romania experienced a brief cultural opening. His first participation in the Venice Biennale, in 1968, opened the door to fruitful collaborations with Western collectors and gallerists. That same year he met the renowned Scottish gallerist Richard Demarco, who visited his studio in Bucharest and invited him to take part in the Romanian Art Today exhibition at the 1971 Edinburgh Festival. Three years later, Maitec held a solo exhibition at the Demarco Gallery.

The 1970s marked the peak of Maitec’s career. He held four solo exhibitions in the UK, which received glowing press coverage. It was during this time that he met collector Jim Ede, founder of Kettle’s Yard Museum and founding member of the Tate Gallery in London. Ede acquired Maitec’s Angels, now part of the Tate collection, along with other sculptures that remain in the Kettle’s Yard collection. Maitec returned to the Venice Biennale three more times - in 1976, 1980, and 1995 - and participated in numerous group shows and international events. His first solo show in Romania took place in 1976 at Galeria Nouă in Bucharest, followed by a second, in 1985, at Sala Dalles, which brought together the most important works of his mature period.

Composed of symmetrical structures suspended in balance around a pivot, Maitec’s kinetic sculptures were titled gates, birds, wings, angels, hinges, balances, banners, shutters, levers, pillars, columns, towers, radars – and later, thrones, containers, hedgehogs, and sarcophagi. His work oscillated between two poles: a timeless monumentality and a fascination with postwar Western neo-avant-garde experiments. In his practice, Maitec sought to reconcile the archaic essence of the material – wood - with the spirit of contemporary technical innovation. Yet in Maitec’s hands, this meeting of the archetypal and the technological remained fluid, warm, and natural, imbued with a quiet spiritual and ascetic quality, and rooted in the almost mystical belief that wood could ultimately become immaterial and transparent.

By inserting light and air into sculpture—through the rhythmic perforations that became a visual signature of his technical innovation—Maitec also invented his own spatial display concept, which he metaphorically described as a forest of sculptures.This idea forms the curatorial concept of the present exhibition: Only when I see them gathered together, like a forest, do I feel and perceive that in their silent and solemn vigil they contain Sources and Order. And that these Sources and this Order should ideally belong to the perfection and miracles of nature, transmitted and re-transmitted through human intelligence and talent, alongside wonder and reverence for all things.

The loss of 70 major works in the fire that broke out during the 1989 Revolution - when his studio was engulfed in flames following armed conflict near the Romanian Television building - had a profound impact on the final phase of Maitec’s career. At the invitation of the French Ministry of Culture, he relocated to Paris but continued to work and exhibit between France and Romania. The once-perforated, light-filled spaces in his sculptures gradually closed, as the artist moved away from the archetypal aura of earlier forms in favour of a starker, more functional minimalism. Thrones became chairs, the phalanx turned into a container, and the sarcophagi, in both name and form, came to resemble benches. This functional minimalism became Maitec’s artistic response to the trauma of losing his work.

Ovidiu Maitec passed away in Paris in 2007, just months before the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest opened the exhibition Bitzan, Maitec, Mitroi, Nicodim, curated by Mihai Oroveanu. In 2019, the National Museum of Art of Romania dedicated a major exhibition to the Maitec family, titled Maitec: Wood, Gold, Vivid.

Curator: Irina Ungureanu Sturza