Art Fridays: Studio Visit with Sculptor Patriciu Mateescu

Venerable Patriciu Mateescu, one of the greatest post-war Romanian sculptors and the founder of Princeton-based Hamangia Foundation, is the artist in focus at our Art Fridays this week. Succeeding in transforming the ceramics into a major art and influencing a whole generation of disciples, Mateescu’s works vary from small to large scale cast porcelain, to unique stoneware figurative monuments in Romania or to abstract composition, all in the hands of this highly skilled artist. His art comes in such various shapes - elongated, curvaceous, circular, geometric, angular - that the eyes of the viewer are confronted simultaneously with the miniature and the monumental, his work being eclectic and unpredictable.

Romanian-American visual artist PATRICIU MATEESCU was born in 1927 in Răchitoasa, Romania. Despite his 93 years of age, he still works daily in his studio, stating that art helps him carry on. He created his first public sculpture - a bust…