Art UK, Live Auction

Born in 1979 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Marius Bercea received both his BA and MA at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 2003 and 2005 respectively. He is known for large-scale paintings that are at once brightly coloured albeit with dark undertones, depicting the banalities and uncertainties of life in early-capitalist Romania, after the fall of communism.

Deeply personal in nature, his works are often set against both decorative and decrepit landscapes where figures collect in scenes of intimacy amounting to surreal, monumental paintings. Alongside Adrian Ghenie and Victor Man, Marius Bercea is regarded as one of the leading artists of the Cluj School, a group of painters who coalesced in Cluj-Napoca after the 1989 Romanian Revolution. Drawing from his own archive of memory and from his direct surroundings, imagery is fragmented, collaged and amalgamated offering an inside look into Bercea’s expansive world which holds past, present, and future, finely wavering between reality and imagination.

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