Chira, Alexandru
Romania, 1947 – 2011
Alexandru Chira was born in 1947 in Romania, in Tauseni, a village in the Cluj County. He graduated in painting at the national art school in Bucharest, the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute. One of the most relevant Romanian conceptual artists, he practiced a symbolism dense with meaning and dialogue with the viewer, himself, the surrounding reality and the transcendence. Describing himself, not without irony, as a “master of utopia”, Alexandru Chira created a world of images and words – a world which contains and expresses these images and words, sometimes repetitively, in a precise technicality, but also transcend them, through the subtlety of emotions and the complexity of forms. There is always, in his art, a multi-dimensional message and an obsession for a complex communication which translates also into the complexity of his oeuvre – drawing, painting, installation, land-art, film, theoretical writing, essays and visual studies. His art has meant a permanent dialogue between the tangible and the intangible, the direct and the subtle, the telluric and the spatial, the dense and the insubstantial, a singular and truly unique vision.
