Exhibition Notes & Curatorial Commentary
George Ștefănescu (1914–2007), later known as George Ștefănescu-Râmnic, was a Romanian painter and scenographer whose career spanned more than seven decades. Born in Plăinești, Vrancea County, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest under Nicolae Dărăscu, whose lessons in color and Post-Impressionist structure strongly shaped his early development. He also learned from Ion Theodorescu-Sion and Lucian Grigorescu. During the Second World War, Ștefănescu served in the military and was seriously wounded on the Crimean front, an experience that disrupted his artistic progress and affected his health for years. After the war, he worked in commercial graphics, film, and theater, becoming especially active as a scenographer from the late 1950s. His stage work strengthened his sense of composition, spatial organization, and dramatic color. Over time, his painting evolved from Post-Impressionist foundations toward a more expressive, stylized language characterized by intense color, simplified forms, rhythmic contours, and lyrical abstraction. He exhibited widely in Romania and abroad and received the Cultural Merit Order in 1973. In 1989 he settled in Lüdinghausen, Germany, where his late work became increasingly free and symbolic. He continued creating into old age, leaving a distinctive legacy within modern Romanian art and European postwar artistic culture.