Costina Collection: Bucharest exhibition showcases ‘canon’ of post-1960s Romanian art

Works from surgeon Sorin Costina’s collection of Romanian art from the 1970s to the 1990s are currently on display at the National Museum of Art of Romania (MNAR) in Bucharest as part of the exhibition De Gardă/ On Duty.

The show gathers 200 of the most significant works from a collection, which comprises around 1,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics, and showcases the “canon” of Romanian art after the 1960s.

Established in Brad, in Hunedoara County, but featuring prominent artists from Bucharest and across the country, the collection reflects a particular aspect of the Romanian art scene under the communist regime: the artistic hierarchy that was familiar to everyone at the time – although never formally articulated – that constantly underpinned the cultural world dominated by official art, a presentation of the show reads.

The exhibition features key names in post-war Romanian visual culture: Horia Bernea, Ștefan Bertalan, Paul Gherasim, Silvia Radu, Vasile Gorduz, Ion Grigorescu, Florin Mitroi, Ioana Bătrânu, Paul Neagu, Florin Niculiu, Georgeta Năpăruș, Ion Dumitriu, Constantin Flondor, Sorin Dumitrescu, and many others.

“The body of works in the Costina Collection is divided into a section focused primarily on experimentation, study, the artistic laboratory, and neo-avant-garde research (in the Kretzulescu Rooms at MNAR), and a broad panorama of the artistic mastery with which artists of the period sought refuge in spirituality, aestheticism, emotion, and (self-)irony (in the Museum of Art Collections), to cope with a regime that distorted beauty and restricted expression, freedom, and faith,” curator Erwin Kessler explains.

The exhibition spreads across two different MNAR buildings. It will be on view in the Kretzulescu Rooms at MNAR from September 30 to November 22, and at the Museum of Art Collections from October 2 to February 16, 2027.