A collection of 34 avant-garde works of art of the 20th century were exhibited in Chisinau for the first time. A project of cooperation between the National Museum of Arts of Moldova and the Museums of Arts of Brasov enabled to mount an exhibition titled “Hans Mattis-Teutsch. Under the sign of avant-garde”, IPN reports.
According to curator and art critic Radu Popică, director of the Museums of Arts of Brasov, artist Mattis-Teutsch embraces a new artistic vision called “constructive realism”. This is aimed at determining the proportions of the “new human” that is typical of the technical and industrial epochs and that will find an ideal expression in the fresco projects. The conceptual and stylistic approaches are reliably reflected in the sculptures of Mattis-Teutsch of that period, from abstract sculptures (floral ornament II) to stylized nudes at the start of the 1930s.
Hans Mattis-Teutsch was a Romanian artist, born to a German-Hungarian family in Brasov, where he also died. Exemplary of the diverse modernity of Central Europe, he moved between Realism and other styles, including Jugendstil, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, constructive Abstraction, and Art Deco.
Like his contemporaries, Mattis-Teutsch extracted stylish, spiritual, and cosmic-theosophical visions from fantasized landscapes and depicted the inner workings of the human mind on his canvases. Mattis-Teutsch was a keystone of the Romanian, Hungarian, and German avant-garde. Though cosmopolitan, he lived mostly in his Transylvanian hometown of Brasov, exhibiting locally and working as a professor at the art college, nourishing a modern, progressive, provincial art-life. In 1946, he founded the first syndicate of “democratic” artists in Romania.
“It is for the first time that we have the occasion to present the works of Hans Mattis-Teutsch to the public in Moldova. Chisinau needs Romanian art, the benchmarks of the Romanian art, such an artist like Hans Mattis-Teutsch,” said Tudor Zbârnea, director general of the National Museum of Arts of Moldova.
The exhibition can be visited until September 5 inclusive.
