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.

photo credits: Serban Savu, The Weeping Willow, 2018, oil on canvas, 150x193cm, courtesy Galeria Plan-B