Art Safari to celebrate 10th anniversary with John Constable exposition

The largest art event in Romania, Art Safari, will celebrate its 10th anniversary through an exposition done in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and featuring art by John Constable as its centerpiece.

Born and raised in rural Suffolk, Constable (1776-1837) is one of the most famous landscape artists in the world. His love of the local countryside had him make it the main subject of his art. During his lifetime, Constable also studied and collected the works of the Great Masters. The great Romanian landscape painter Nicolae Grigorescu was inspired by Constable’s pictorial lessons and incorporated them into his art.

The exhibition, titled “Seeking Truth: The Art of John Constable,” is organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, and will show his paintings, drawings, and watercolors, highlighting Constable’s innovative techniques. In all, over 80 oil paintings and other works on paper by Constable will be presented during Art Safari.

The V&A museum is one of the most important arts and design museums in the world. It hosts a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects, books, and archives that preserve over 5,000 years of creativity in diverse fields such as architecture, fashion, photography, sculpture, painting, jewelry, glass, and theater, among others.

“The partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, honors us and confirms the status achieved over time by Art Safari Bucharest as the most important manifestation of the Romanian scene in the field of visual arts,” said Ioana Ciocan, Art Safari General Manager.

Art Safari’s International Pavilion will also feature fresh contemporary art, developed in partnership with the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Romania, along with a poster exhibition by Byoungil Sun.

Constable’s paintings will be joined by those of Ștefan Popescu, one of the most important Romanian traveler-painters, in the Romanian Pavilion. Attached to French culture, Popescu visited Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, but also Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Germany, and Yugoslavia. He received the French Legion of Honor in 1925, was one of Queen Maria’s favorite painters, and a close friend of Romania’s most famous sculptor, Constantin Brâncuși.

Developed in partnership with the Bucharest City Museum, the “Ștefan Popescu. Travel Story” exposition will treat visitors to Popescu’s French seascapes and cloudy Breton coasts.

Other expositions will feature paintings by Lillian Theil and Mihai Muresan.

The event will place between September 23 and December 11 at Dacia-Romania Palace, part of the Museum of Bucharest. Tickets are on sale at a 20% discount until August 26.