SERBAN SAVU

Born 1978, lives and works in Cluj (RO).
The years of Şerban Savu’s youth shall cover the period of rapid political and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1989, when in Romania the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown in a bloody manner, Savu was 11 years old. He received his artistic education at the University of Arts in Cluj-Napoca, where he studied with artists such as Victor Man and Adrian Ghenie. Shortly after, their work was included in the new wave of Romanian painting, known as "School of Cluj”.

What distinguishes Savu from his colleagues is his realistic style and para-documentary knack. However, the realism of his paintings has little in common with socrealistic doctrine, which in the past was prominent in Romanian art. Crucial for him is the classic tradition of European painting, particularly Italian and French. In Savu’s works, we see echoes of Leon Battista Alberti's assumptions, idyllic landscapes of Poussin and Lorrain, and finally depictions of peasants by Pieter Bruegel and Jean-Frainçois Millet. These inspirations set in contemporary Romanian landscape became part of a melancholic tale of a fallen empire somewhere on the borders of the civilized world.

bio