Horia Damian (

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north of ...

, 27 Feb 1922 -

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

14 May 2012) was a

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...

n painter and sculptor.

Biography

Damian enrolled at the School of Architecture in Bucharest in 1941. In that same year he made his debut at the Salonul Official de Pictura at Sala Dalles in Bucharest. His first one-man show took place at the Ateneul Roman in Bucharest in 1942. He was awarded the Anastase Simu Prize for painting. In 1946, he won a scholarship to Paris, where he later settled. After a few months with André Lhote he worked with Daniel Lager in 1949-50 and then studied with

Auguste Herbin Auguste Herbin (29 April 1882 – 31 January 1960) was a French painter of modern art. He is best known for his Cubist and abstract paintings consisting of colorful geometric figures. He co-founded the groups Abstraction-Création and Salon des ...

, becoming acquainted with Piet Mondrian's work through Felix del Marle (1889–1952). This encounter with abstract art led to his first truly original paintings, such as ''Starry Night'', which consists of a geometric arrangement of white dots. He destroyed most of the works he produced during the second half of the 1950s, an experimental period for him. His works of the early 1960s, executed in oil on a polyester base, are in a gestural, impasto style close to

Tachism __NOTOC__ Tachisme (alternative spelling: Tachism, derived from the French word ''tache'', stain) is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. The term is said to have been first used with regards to the movement in 19 ...

, as in ''Constellation''. By the late 1960s, his work had become increasingly geometric and sculptural, as exemplified by the Throne series; these are not free-standing sculptures, but rather set against plain backgrounds. The first of his large-scale monuments, ''Galaxy'', a project for a Monument at Houston, Texas, was designed in 1972 and constructed in 1974 at the Neue Galerie in Aachen. Several further monuments in the Galaxy series were constructed, others remaining as

maquette A ''maquette'' (French word for scale model, sometimes referred to by the Italian names ''plastico'' or ''modello'') is a scale model or rough draft of an unfinished sculpture. An equivalent term is ''bozzetto'', from the Italian word for "sketc ...

s. His fascination with the monumental continued in ''The Hill'', constructed for the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

in New York from

styrofoam Styrofoam is a trademarked brand of closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam (XPS), commonly called "Blue Board", manufactured as foam continuous building insulation board used in walls, roofs, and foundations as thermal insulation and water barrie ...

covered with tiny paper spheres and then painted yellow. This was followed by similar monuments, such as that for

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

, which is illustrated in the

gouache Gouache (; ), body color, or opaque watercolor is a water-medium paint consisting of natural pigment, water, a binding agent (usually gum arabic or dextrin), and sometimes additional inert material. Gouache is designed to be opaque. Gouache ...

Project for San Francisco.Project for San Francisco (1979; Marseille, Mus. Cantini; see also 1980 exh. cat.)

Notes

Bibliography

Romanian sculptors 2012 deaths 1922 births Artists from Bucharest Artists from Paris 20th-century Romanian painters 21st-century Romanian painters {{Romania-sculptor-stub