Bucur and Margareta Chiriac Collection

The collection of Romanian contemporary art Bucur and Marieta Chiriac represents one of the most important donations offered to the Romanian state, after the 1989 revolution and the largest art donation made to the city of Buzău to date. It is difficult to summarize in just a few words all the work and passion of the collectors Marieta and Bucur Chiriac, as it is not easy to understand all the struggle and search, the paths they took to form this majestic collection.

The whole exhibition is intelligently orchestrated right from the entrance, through showcases with albums and personal books, the bust cast in bronze of Bucur Chiriac as well as a lot of diplomas and awards that tell the story of the Marieta and Bucur Chiriac family.

To prove that folk art is the root from which Romanian artists are inspired, objects of folk art were exhibited in the window and next to the door: ceramics, plates and cups, wooden cutlery, masks made by the craftsman Nicolae Pană, eggs painted with beautiful popular geometric motifs, carved chairs, values ​​that Marieta and Bucur Chiriac have collected for a lifetime.

The exhibition is a means of educating the viewer's aesthetic taste, to a good extent already educated by contact with popular art from the Romanian area and universal art. The themes of the paintings, through the exhibiting artists' original methods of approach, are different facts from the lives of some people, a sequence of contemporary or legendary episodes, portraits, historical events or the surprise of children in the joy of play, the embodiment of the seasons, birds, animals and vegetation.

This valuable collection is important because it capitalizes, with the means of contemporary art, a real treasure of ideas, feelings and intuitions about the world and life, of this talented Romanian people.

The academic attitude and artistic rigor stand out in every work, regardless of the working technique. By recreating the scheme of the folklore ornament, designed in three-dimensional space, a great exhibiting sculptor, Ion Irimescu, creates a modern style, just as in the only tapestry in the exhibition entitled Prietenele, signed by the renowned artist Cela Nemţu, he tries to decipher in her chromatic language , the spirituality of the folk bark, or of the beautiful folk motifs.

Taking folkloric creation as a starting point, in its chromatics or ornamental motifs, a series of painters manage to obtain imaginative syntheses, with a pleasant visual effect.

Among the painters of the middle generation of the 20th century, who add new elements to the old traditions, thus tending towards an art that organically incorporates in its substance the language conquests of the modern era, they present us paintings with robust aesthetic thinking, twinning rigor with sensitivity in their paintings, artists such as Alexandru Ciucurencu, Ion Pacea, Brăduţ Covaliu, Sabin Bălaşa, Dan Hatmanu, Gheorghe Ciobanu, Teodor Bogoi, Petre Abrudan, Ştefan Câltia, Ion Grigore, George Apostu and many others.

Together with them, the young hopes that the painter Valeriu Şuşnea and the sculptor Dan Drăghiciu, belonging to the new generations who set out to achieve a superior synthesis between the spiritual endowment of our people, crystallized in the succession of centuries and what constitutes real progress in the evolution of the art of our era.

The painter Dan Hatmanu, a good friend of the Marieta and Bucur Chiriac family since his youth and being a portraitist par excellence, painted the portraits of his friends, painting Bucur Chiriac with a statuary, solid and monumental silhouette, a possible Don Quixote de la Mancha, next to his Dulcinea dressed in period medieval costume, wonderful portraits that we see at the entrance to the exhibition. The painter Dan Hatmanu - a penetrating analyst of human psychology, knew how to interpret the inner desire of his friends, offering us an original philosophical meditation on man and his condition.

It is noticeable in the exhibition the presence of paintings by artists from all generations who exhibit two or more works, forming true micro-collections inside the Marieta and Bucur Chiriac Contemporary Art Collection.

The collection of houses and churches painted in his unmistakable style by the painter Ion Grigore is special and beautiful. These favorite subjects, chosen by Ion Grigore, cultivate the national tradition, as well as the modern one in an original formula. First of all, the knowledge of popular traditions created the possibility of authentic renewals, new conquests in expression, visible in all his paintings.

The impetuous transformation of Romanian contemporary painting and the metamorphoses it received in the last decades of the 20th century pulverized the canons of a secular European art, an aspect that is far from finished.

The entire Marieta and Bucur Chiriac Art Collection expresses the richness of the Romanian spirit and its harmonious beauty in each exhibited work, to convey this spiritual complexity to us so that the viewer can receive it in his soul, becoming himself loving and generous.