#4. Romanian Traditional New Year's Eve Orig.Mask Painting By Elena Sirbu READ!

Description: These paintings depict the artists many encounters of the faces who made her smile through the eyes of a young woman rebelling against communist Romania. As told by her Daughter: “My heart will always beat for my Romanian people And I will always sing for its joy and sorrow.” This is how Queen Marie of Romania began one of her conferences at the Academy of Romania in Bucharest in 1911. Many years after this event, during one of the most ferocious and cruelest communist dictatorships, my late mother, Elena Sirbu, submitted to the public attention both in Romania and in some European countries such as Switzerland, Italy, and Greece a whole suite of paintings, made mainly between 1970 – 1985. Her sensitivity and rich imagination expressed in hundreds of works of art was her hidden cry of rebellion against communism. Manifested on a very diversified pallet of artistic and visual expression such as landscapes, flowers, and masks, Elena Sirbu depicted her dreams, aspiration of freedom, and soul in all her art. Unfortunately, due to the harsh conditions imposed by communism, religion persecution, and lack of internet information she could not make herself known abroad. No doubt, everything started from a deep feeling of loneliness, or rather from her own struggle to express certain wishes in order to reach beauty. Her paintings in the beginning of her career (landscapes and flowers) speak about her inner feelings and sensitivity. Her landscapes and flowers combine her taste for the mystical area depicted in a warm reflexive, and impressionist lyricism. ELENA SIRBU’S MASKS People will always be in need of truth even though sometimes it may be expressed under the mask of a lie. And here mask means protection. But beyond the figurative human mask, from times immemorial we have the masks as a magic or as a symbol, the masks used in carnivals or the character-masks. From despising pains to the exulting of happiness, Elena Sirbu’s New Years’s Eve traditional masks create human types of various characters; they attract and reject, they combine strange with fantastic swinging between fairy tales and legends. Her masks are not simply masks, but a whole artistic painting about masks. Her masks embody social realities with grotesque influences, legendary and contemporary characters, a mixture between real people with unreal beings. She starts from the Romanian ancestral masks playing with those of other peoples. Strange enough some of her masks remind us of Halloween, of All Saints’ Eve, of martyrs and creepy creatures, a perfect association of macabre and supernatural. And all these elements she made use of were perfectly rooted in the humoristic way of her visual art. The whole gallery of her masks welcomes you in a unique atmosphere of intense emotional feelings wedging unseen bridges between mankind and the universe, between present and ancestral times, between any human being and all human beings. Her masks and their ceremonial disguises make the distinction between the old and the new year. And the whole area where she was born abounds of this tradition which is manifested between Christmas and Epiphany. Imagination is incredible. They are hand-made of all sorts of fabrics, patches of leather, feathers, fur, wool, beads etc. The most unimaginable things that nobody pays attention to during the year, have a greatest value now. Masks are worn by men who march on the streets of the villages. They dance and sing special traditional songs wishing farmers to forget about the old year and be healthy and prosperous in the new year to come. The myriad of colors and the atmosphere fill children and adults with joy. Out of her wish “to shock” the viewers and to set off in their psychic a certain state of mind, put in every single mask painted by Elena Sirbu magic subordinated esthetic and ludic. There is no violence or nightmare in her paintings. Her masks are typological human beings that caricature, portraying not the human being but his vices. With a great artistic skill, she sketches what is beyond appearances not making use of any dramatism or reproach. She painted all these masks while smiling. Elena Sirbu’s masks, painted in a vivid and colorful chromaticism, introduce us in the world of a human realistic show. Not only an ancient Romanian art but also an ancestral universal art transposed in her original visual language whose dominant note is the subtle irony. Exceptional in their ways, her masks express through “excess” and “abnormal” the fantastic and unique expressivity of human faces and characters. Thus, archaic traditions are brought up to contemporary sensitivity. Her artistic creation reminds of a childhood full of fairy tale characters, starting form the primary relationship between good and bad. Her art is a synthesis of serenity and grotesque, of realism and poetry, of calm contemplation and irony.

Price: 115 USD

Location: Toledo, Ohio

End Time: 2025-01-23T16:50:16.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD