
Serban Savu
Pleasant Chat, 2010

In his realist, melancholic paintings, Cluj School artist Serban Savu—who grew up during the overturn of Communism—depicts a newly democratic society among the drab modernist housing and abandoned factories of Romania's cities and countryside. Using a subdued palette and impressionistic figures, he presents nature as dominated by concrete, as in Mountain of Nostalgia (2008), in which men sift through a junkyard's wreckage. An anti-heroic update to Socialist Realism, Savu's work also references the history of landscape painting.


In his realist, melancholic paintings, Cluj School artist Serban Savu—who grew up during the overturn of Communism—depicts a newly democratic society among the drab modernist housing and abandoned factories of Romania's cities and countryside. Using a subdued palette and impressionistic figures, he presents nature as dominated by concrete, as in Mountain of Nostalgia (2008), in which men sift through a junkyard's wreckage. An anti-heroic update to Socialist Realism, Savu's work also references the history of landscape painting.