Ioana Baltan

Recollection 2

2022

“Entity” is part of “Recollecting Paradise” project, which has been under development since the beginning of 2021 and consists mainly of medium to large works that have at their core...

Developed in London in 2019 and 2020, this project focuses on the idea of dreaming and although the emerging compositions are closed and defined they are also very dynamic and vibran...

“Recollecting 4” has been under development since the beginning of 2021 and consists mainly of medium to large works that have at their core a search for the idea of paradise as a pl...

"Recollecting 9" is part of a series titled "Recollecting Paradise" started by the artist in early 2021. This work revolves around a female character that finds herself in a deep sta...

Created at the beginning of 2022 in London, “Memory” is inspired from one of the artist’s dreams and captures a character placed in a completely natural setting, highlighted by colou...

Developed in London during 2019 this work is focuses on the idea of dreaming and remembering childhood. The composition is closed and defined by brushstrokes and spray paint effect...

This replica of the last self-portrait of Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted in 1804, executed by his daughter Anna at her father's side and recently rediscovered, provides us with a poignant image of the great artist, represented with panache despite the disillusions of life. 1. Jean-Baptiste Greuze Jean-Baptiste Greuze was the sixth child of a roofer from Tournus and retained a certain rusticity in his behaviour from his provincial childhood, beyond his taste for describing picturesque scenes of the countryside. He initially started training with a little-known painter from Lyon, Charles Grandon, before his genius was recognised in Paris where he became a full-time student of the Académie (of Painting) in 1755. He exhibited his work for the first time at the Salon during the summer of 1755, before leaving on a trip to Italy in the company of Louis Gougenot, abbot of Chezal-Benoît. Upon his return to Paris, Greuze became a prolific painter, participating widely in the Salons held between 1759 and 1765, to which he sent no less than 63 paintings: numerous genre scenes (The Marriage Contract, The Beloved Mother), but also portraits of his family circle, of courtiers and art lovers, or of his colleagues. The Academy closed the doors of the Salons to him in 1767 for not having produced his reception piece within six months of his reception, as was the tradition. He worked actively on this painting (Emperor Severus rebukes Caracalla, his son, for trying to assassinate him ) until the summer of 1769, tackling historical and mythological subjects for the first time. Once this was completed, he was then fully admitted to the Academy, but as a genre painter, and not as an historical painter, which had been one of the greatest humiliations of his life. Greuze then refused any participation in events organised by the Academy or its successor, the Academy of Fine Arts until 1800. Abandoning history painting, he gave a new twist to genre scenes, bringing them closer to history painting, as in this pair of canvases which constitutes some of his masterpieces: The Paternal Curse: The Ungrateful Son and The Paternal Curse: The Punished Son . Married in 1759 to Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, the daughter of a Parisian bookseller, his marriage was unhappy and his wife probably frequently unfaithful. The institution of divorce enabled him to record their separation in 1793, keeping his two daughters Anna-Geneviève, born in April 1762, and Louise-Gabrielle, born in May 1764, with him. Little is known about his daughter Anna except that she was herself a painter and lived with her father until his death. It is likely that most of the paintings she produced up to that date were attributed to her father, whose technique she shared to a great extent, making it extremely difficult to establish an autonomous corpus of her paintings. Greuze died in his studio at the Louvre on March 21st 1805. The attention paid to the expressivity of his characters and the emotional charge they convey enabled Jean-Baptiste Greuze to enjoy immense popularity with the eighteenth-century public, and they still constitute Greuze's true modernity. As the artist said, "I dipped my brush in my heart". Greuze was also an exceptional draughtsman and a portraitist of immense talent and exceptional longevity who painted both the Dauphin (the son of Louis XV and father to Louis XVI) and the young Napoleon Bonaparte. 2. Greuze's self-portraits Greuze was very much influenced by Dutch paintings during all his life. While the source of his inspiration for genre scenes can be found in Gerard Dou...

Bruce Adams was a painter, art educator, and writer. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1952, he received a B.S. in 1976 and an M.A. in 1983 from Buffalo State College. Adams’s work is included in numerous private and museum collections, among them the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University, and the UB Anderson Gallery (all of which are located in Western New York...

In Lion in the Kitchen, his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Benn reflected on the textures and potential narratives of domestic space. After spending a season indoors with h...

Over the last few years Francien has created a series of paintings, which stylistically dovetail into its overall work. This interesting new series came about by the birth of her lon...

Francien Krieg, a contemporary Dutch artist, gives a new dimension to figurative painting with her penetrating and unfiltered portraits. Krieg, who received her art education at the ...

oil on linen