Iulian Mereuță (1943 – 2015) is an artist and art critic with a vast work, apparently heterogeneous, seductive and fascinating. He was born in 1943 in Romania and died in 2015, leaving behind an extremely diverse body of work. He spent most of his life in Paris, where he arrived in 1978 (the artist’s studio having been confiscated, his work in the studio was largely destroyed by the communist authorities), after a relatively short period of artistic activity in Bucharest, where his first solo exhibition took place, hosted by the Galateea Gallery in 1974. He will take part in the Jeune Peinture – Jeune Expression exhibition, in the French section of the Bilbao Biennial of Graphic Arts Arteder ’82, in the exhibition 8 Artistes Roumains dans un espace alternatif and will also be exhibited by Galerie de la Platone.

His impressive body of work includes neo-avant-garde formulas such as conceptual art, action art, experimental film and sculptural installation, as well as numerous feverish experiments with traditional artistic media such as painting and drawing. Iulian Mereuță operates a delicate, but permanently fiery search for ways to incorporate something essential into art, an implicit and sometimes strangely visually translated conviction that the meaning of art must somehow approximate, or even coincide with, the meaning of existence. This ambition is an acute feature of the artist’s work.

His work has only recently been made coherently known to the Romanian public by exhibition events such as the retrospective hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art (2019 – 2020), and the exhibition “Invention of the Ego” at the Sector 1 Gallery in Bucharest (2021).