Virginia Baz Baroiu

Timişoara Branch
of the Fine Arts Union of Romania
Virginia Baz Baroiu
Painter
Versiunea în limba română The English language version






Born on the 25th of January 1932 in Cernăuţi, Ukraine.

Studies: Academy of Fine Arts "Nicolae Grigorescu" Bucharest - graduated in 1957.

Member of The Fine Arts Union of Romania - Timişoara since 1958.


In 1957 - debut in water-colours , participating in yearly art exhibitions, official art shows in Bucharest, Timişoara, Suceava, Galaţi, Constanţa, Cluj Napoca, Iaşi, in group exhibitions and itinerant shows in Romania and abroad.

Group exhibitions in Romania: Timişoara, Călimăneşti, Brăila, Deta, Sînicolaul Mare, Constanţa, Buzău, Turnu Măgurele, Giurgiu, Orşova, Strehaia, Turnu Severin, Tîrgovişte, Bucharest, 1969 - National Art Exhibition "Voroneţiana" - Suceava, 1997 - National Art Exhibition - Reşiţa.

Group exhibitions abroad:
1969 - Yugoslavia - Novi Sad - "Matice Srpske Gallery".
1970 - Yugoslavia - Belgrade.
1974 - Italy - Modena - "Galleria Civica D'Arte Moderna".
1981 - Germany - Delmenhorst - "Galeria Hans Coburg".
1982-1984 - Germany - Gera.
1989 - Yugoslavia - Belgrad.
1990-1992 - Hungary - Szeged.

One - man shows:
1960 - România - Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".
1970 - România - Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".
1970 - Italy - Vicenza - "Galleria il Salotto".
1971 - Italy - Vicenza - "Galleria il Salotto".
1972 - Italia - Torino - "Galleria l'Approdo".
1973 - România - Timişoara, Reşiţa, Oradea, Bistriţa-Năsăud, Bucharest - "Amphora Gallery".
1973 - Switzerland - Les Diablerets.
1973 - Switzerland - Vulpera - "Galleria Engiadina".
1974 - Switzerland - The Art Exhibition at the Fifth "Music and Snow Festival" Les Diablerets.
1978 - România - Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".
1981 - România - Bucureşti - "The Home of Art Gallery".
1982 - România - Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".
1986 - România - Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".
1991 - Austria - Vienna - "Welt Gallery".
1996 - România - Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".
1997 - România - Timişoara - "The Turkish-Romanian Bank Gallery".
1997 - România -Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".
2006 - România -Timişoara - "Helios Gallery".

International exhibitions:
1974 - Switzerland - Les Diablerets.
1979 - Bulgaria - Tîrgovişte "International Water-Colour Exhibition".

Romanian Art Exhibitions Abroad:
1968 - Czechoslovacia - Prague - Bratislava.
1970 - Marroco - Rabat.
1971 - India - New Delhi.
1974 - Nigeria - Lagos.
1975 - Iraq - Baghdad.
1975 - The Philippines - Manila.
1975 - Pakistan - Islamabad, Rawalp indi, Pesha war, Karachi.
1976 - Sweden - Helsingborg, Malmö, Göteborg.
1977 - Norway - Oslo.
1977 - Turkey - Ankara, Istambul.
1979 - Cyprus.
1979 - Greece -Athens.
1979 - Bulgaria - Sofia, Tîrgovişte, Popov, Razgrad.
1980 - Portugal - Lisbon.
1982 - Italy - Ferrara.
1982 - Germany - Neue - Lobeda Jena.
1983 - Brazil.
1984 - China - Beyijing.
1984 - Germany - Stuttgart.
1985 - Czechoslovakia - Prague, Bratislava.
1986 - USSR - Moscow, Alma.
1985 - Germany - Berlin, Rostock.
1986 - Belgium.
1986 - Spain - Madrid.

Prizes and distinctions: 1979 - Bucharest - the III rd prize in graphics; 1979 - Bulgaria - the "Nicola Marinov" medal at The International Water-colour Exhibition of Tîrgovişte; 2012 - Timisoara - the Pro Cultura prize.

Art Works in the museums of: Bucharest, Timişoara, Reşiţa, Bistriţa-Năsăud, Suceava, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Craiova, Cluj-Napoca, Tg. Mureş; Bulgaria - Popov, Tîrgovişte, Razgrad, Sofia.

Art Works in private collections: România, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, Switzerland, Cuba, Austria, Yugoslavia, Canada, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, USA, Germany, Israel, France, Hungary, Spain.

Published books:
1974 - "Affirmations" by Mircea Deac.
1976 - "The Dictionary of the Contemporary Romanian Artists" by Octavian Barbosa.
1984 - "Art in Bucovina" by Emil Satco.
1986 - "The Phonetics of the Stars" by Anghel Dumbrăveanu.
1988 - "Romanian Contemporary Watercolour" by Valentin Ciucă.
1991 - "Fine Artists from Bucovina" by Emil Satco.
1992 - "Timisorean Fine Artists" by Negoiţă Lăptoiu.
2000 - "The Encyclopedia of the Contemporary Romanian Artists" by Negoiţă Lăptoiu,Vasile Florea si Alexandru Cebuc.
2003 - "Tradition and Postmodernism-Two Centuries of Fine Art in Banat" by Ion Marin Almăjan, Andrei Medinski.
2007 - "Unknown Europa-Treasures from Bucovina" by dr.Ion Mareş, dr.Paraschiva Victoria Batariuc, Constantin Emil Ursu, dr. Mugur Andronic, prof.Violeta Marianciuc, prof. Suzana Coşovan şi Laura Ursu.
2011 - "The Illustrated Dictionary of the Fine Arts from Bucovina, 1800-2010" by Valentin Ciucă.

Critical remark
Ion Frunzetti- "Un poet liric: Acuarelista Virginia Baz- Baroiu"

("A Lyrical Poet: Virginia Baz-Baroiu the Water-colour Painter ) in:"Contemporanul",Bucharest, 7 Decembrie 1973
A fantastic lyricism is relieved from Virginia Baz Baroiu's works. She seems to illustrate an unwritten literature of her own, romantic in pulsation, full of the magic of the fairy-tale realms, with citadels, fortress towers swallowed up by violet mists; terrestrial meadows and underwater preeries, real or dreamt of, with hyperborean regions covered by snow borrowing the reflection of the suggested northern lights. This world is also luxuriantly populated with virgin forests, flesh-eating flowers and multicoloured birds in the air, full of fragrance, effluvia and humming.
If painting is a synesthesia, i.e.the production of some complexes of sensations streaming from the directions of all our senses stimulating only the optic route - then the chromatic signal coming from this lady's art is really painting, as it arouses so many concordant associations and sensations, so many dream-like perceptions. It is an optimistic and calm fantastic bordering the limits of the visually grasped reality which is lyrically integrated, not deliberately, in a poetical context of an unrealistic type, like the successful metaphor in the verse. Sometimes affinities with Turner and other times with Yves Tanguy or Masson make the works be "dated"differently.
...It is like a dream with closed eyes... Splendid phantoms, the irisations of concordant lights, musically interwoven...the shapes created by Virginia Baz-Baroiu are patterns for a masque of reality, not repudiated but transfigured through that which lies as a valency of nobility and splendor in her.


Mircea Deac-"Afirmări" ("Booms" ),1974

Rarely have I met an artist who loves water colour as much as Virginia Baz Baroiu does! The voluptuousness of passion erupts towards the surface in the pictorial atmosphere of her works, full of interior tensions, denoting a long and mature experience...
Virginia Baz Baroiu makes us rediscover and love nature, one which raises interesting problems, of graphic construction or of an ineffable poetry which bears in itself the mystery of creation and of becoming. In her works, nature has nothing static but it pulsates, vibrates and is sentimental.


Damian Ureche -the preface to the Switzerland exhibition catalogue 1974

It is a delight for our senses triggered to perceive sensations , to bridge communication with Virginia Baz Baroiu's art. Not so much for a particular significance but for an eflorescence of meanings each painting is enriched with. This water colour is made up of whirls in which the colours are dissolved to the point of becoming transparent, which is precisely the lyrical feature of this painter. A real miracle of silent explosions.Out of the hot transfiguration of the real, flames of soul and colour give birth to a musical eruption of nuances. Maybe that is why, it is not seldom that Virginia Baz Baroiu's plastic language is taken for the imperceptible vibration of poetry:
"I'm building colours, yet the wall's about to fall.
Striking at winters, I pity the snow, all,
And I'm only the sword between the good and ill,
I speak of the fire that's in me here to feel".


Deliu Petroiu: "Virginia Baz Baroiu",in :"Orizont" review, Timişoara, 5 Octombrie 1978

The atmosphere and the fluidity, the vibration of colour and the humidity, the all covering breeze of the works, just adumbrated in the light, the iridescent radiance and the mysterious shadows-features of the lyrical and dreamy stamp-they are all found as definitory in Virginia Baz Baroiu's water-colours.


Ciprian Radovan - "Împliniri a unei arte deschise spre public" ( "Rounding up an Art Open to the Public" ), in "Drapelul Roşu" , Timişoara 1 octombrie 1978

Famous for her being an excellent user of the water-colour technique (and we do not exaggerate) one of the best water-colour painters in our country, she is an artist of a particular consistency and power of working . Virginia Baz Baroiu expresses herself in art in a way which meets the requirements of the art public or of the lover of art .The sense of harmony, the warm character of the structure, the serene affective symbology are some of the essential aspects which account for the extraordinary capacity of communication, of "grasping", as experienced by the on-looker.


Anghel Dumbrăveanu- "Într-o privire de pasăre fermecată" ("In the Eyes of a Charmed and Charming bird" ) Orizont ,Timişoara 11 Ianuarie 1979

Virginia Baz Baroiu enters the competition with nature in her permanently seeking to transform the rock, the light and water into colours and fragrances.It's comparable to the way Balzac is said to have competed with the registrar's office by building the captivating world of the Human Comedy.
Fascination-here is an obsessive word which calls for the right to emphasize something from the miracle named Virginia Baz Baroiu. This exhibition of miracles, this celebration of flowers, these inexhaustible garlands of the dream, again reveal an unexpectedly pure aquarellist, within the endless and striking areas of an exultant creative imagination...
He who does not decide to allot time for meeting Virginia Baz Baroiu's art, will be "seven years poorer" in speaking, sadder in walking , with a paler kiss than we are among those who have come to visit the Arcadia belonging to this great aquarellist. The poet woman-painter would like that her colour phantasms should have the dynamism given by her i.e to take us by our wings and get us into crazy wirls of light and hope .


Dan Grigorescu- Cronica plastică ( "On Fine Arts" ) , in: România liberă, 8 iulie 1981

There have been rightly evoked names like Turner, Masson, Tanguy; the merit of this artist is to have accomplished a personal synthesis in which her poetic temperament steadily asserts itself. It is a mixture of grace and vigour, going beyond the level of the decorative, putting forth images of a great purity of sentiment.
Virginia Baz Baroiu has the quality of the artist who thinks of every stage of his art as a short halt on her way to new investigations.


Cristina Angelescu- "Cronica sentimentală" ("A Sentimental Fine Art Report") Săptămâna , Bucureşti 10 iulie 1981

The artist comes from the stock of those wonderful poets who look for the absolute charm. They are poets who aspire to subdue and "narcotize" the people to such an extent that those who experience the strong essences and harmonies (given to the power of the drog adumbrating the world designed by this artist) do become addicts to the desire of coming back again into this magnetic universe.
In Virginia Baz Baroiu's exhibition there occurs nature's intimate life, moreover, the connection of any of reality's elements with the cosmos and the infinity of the worlds... The fantastic here is an emanation of her poetic grace and gift; it is the longing for the impossible, the poetic halloo which becomes the interior structure of the images which bubble up their brilliance, equally proclaiming the confidence in colour.
Virginia Baz Baroiu's water-colour exhibition goes beyond the limits within which one perceives this kind of art ,ranging among the perennial values created by the contemporary Romanian artists.


Theodor Redlow-:"Jurnalul galeriilor"("The Report on the Galleries")in: "Arta"review, Bucureşti ,no 9, 1981

The most poetical universe possible, the most enchanting and inspired one was that created by Virginia Baz Baroiu...The abundance of wet interwoven colour tones, now and then crystalize thrilling configurations. The fluids gather in petal festoons or in garlands of twirling wings, in celestial or terrestial mirages, thus creating a quasi-musical ambiance as "an articulate form of feeling"(Susanne Langer). Here virtuosity serves the expression most properly.Virginia Baz Baroiu's aquarelles seem to have been worked in trance, in a perpetual jubilation with all censuring abolished. The works demonstrate her gift in spontaneously transcribing the enchantment of a soul thirsting for the emotional liquor that a myriad of splendours can offer, and with no decrease in intensity...


Cornel Radu Constantinescu-: "Jurnal de galerie" ( " A Gallery Journal " ) , in Contemporanul, Bucureşti 17 iulie, 1981.

...Virginia Baz Baroiu imagines fantastic landscapes , mirific under-water gardens racing clouds, Fata Morgana fortresses which place her vision in the realm of the enchanting and bright dream. So the continuous jubilation is the mood she assumes in creating her works; it is the candid ecstasy when facing the human aptitude of transfiguring reality into fairy-tale.


Marina Preutu-: Virginia Baz Baroiu , in :Scânteia,Bucureşti 24 iulie , 1981.

For Virginia Baz Baroiu the vegetal décor is a territory of serenity, of equilibrium, an environment which is offered generously to dreaming... The chromatic harmonies with clear invigorating charm illustrate not only the artist's capacity to handle them, as a virtuoso does but they are also invitations to the ingenious correlation to the metaphorical commentary.


Anghel Dumbrăveanu- Virginia Baz Baroiu, o poetă a culorii ( "Virginia Baz-Baroiu a Colour Poet"), in : Orizont ,Timişoara 26 noiembrie 1982.

...You can enter the world of these paintings and immediately you will put on wings as nobody has seen before: you will fly over fantastic landscapes belonging to realms that our being has been waiting for a long time. You will take a journey through silence , and spout into the white foams of the waterfalls. You will see the sky lying between us and what you knew before - the earth - will be shown to you in the stretch of the glowing welkin, or in the spaces of the night or in the gardens, down in the deep silence of the seas. You can tear yourselves away from the ground and take flight together with the flowers, the birds and fancy floating in the heights, without parting from those things (dear to your soul) that have been built in those flowers and birds. You can see yellow birds at the brim of the dream, you can imagine a deserted town in which only the moon and our secret thought are still asleep. You can see how the waters have the colour of the young woman's eyes, you can be convinced that the flight may have a thousand colours - when feeling joy, when we hope or suffer, or love. You can accompany Virginia Baz Baroiu to the places where no man has ever trodden the land, a realm of solitude where the night - birds flock together and play with the moon. Your eye can touch the infinite and if you have time, you can see the trees precisely at the moment they are not aware that they are being watched. But perhaps they are not trees proper but future forms of our passage to and return from the territories of light and fear we have not yet reached. Then the dream of colours taking flight. Then the fire-bird, or the bird closed up in a drop of tear. What can the painting, in which colours sing, be but an unparalleled joy? Mark Chagall warns that "art cannot be real without a drop of the unreal". It is precisely what Virginia Baz Baroiu tells using a contemporary plastic expression, original and invested with the attributes of durability...
For Virginia Baz Baroiu painting aquarelles is a synthesis of music, poetry and colour, one illuminated by dream and thought, an art which goes beyond its status, situating itself in the frontier zone of arts, in a seductive contamination. Passing by these windows which seem to open to another fabulous world we come to understand that we face a world of thoughts and dreams belonging to a great poet of colour, an artist endowed with the capacity of casting spells upon us taking us to imaginary bourns in order to participate in the meanings of a plea of strong originality and profound human significances.


Vasile Drăguţ- "Ateliere timişorene" ( "Timisoarean Studios" ) in Arta, nr. 7-8, Bucureşti ,1982

Virginia Baz Baroiu's water-colour paintings are a form of decoding the moods for whose inflorescence the reality grasped is only a pretext...
The image born under the brush dipped into the coloured water of the aquarelle is discreetly magical, pierced by the unseen wave of poetry - a tender poetry, a soft music in a flat clef...


Negoiţă Lăptoiu- "Virginia Baz- Baroiu" , in Steaua, Cluj Napoca, Decembrie, 1986.

Supported by the vitality and candour of a definitory poetical structure of inward nature, Virginia Baz Baroiu's vision seems to be capable of new imaginative openings. Through them we shall bracingly travel far and wide, admiring the finely orchestrated accords of some overflowings of colours with a generous reserve of configuration.


Anghel Dumbrăveanu- Registrul de toamnă al meditaţiei (The Autumnal Register of Meditation) in Orizont-Timişoara, 3 octombrie , 1986

...The artist possesses an inexhaustible reserve of the fantastic. She is able to dream of miraculous worlds, intensifying in us a consuming longing for the beautiful.The rare secret of these adventures of fantasy is the knowledge of dreaming in a kind of plea for the nobility of life... Virginia Baz Baroiu's exhibition is unitary with respect to the convergence of concerns, enlarging a configurated artistic universe, increasing the abundance of topics, giving a new depth to the colouristic obsession, finding novel solutions in the domain of the graphical language.This exhibition reveals the profile of an artist "on the summit of her dignity" as Tudor Arghezi would say. She is a prominent personality of contemporary fine arts, in the prime of her creative powers.


Negoiţă Lăptoiu-Plasticieni timişoreni( "Timisoarean Fine-arts Artists" ), Ed. Artemis, Bucureşti 1992

The result of some fecund imaginative reserve, her works reveal that surprising evasion towards the sphere of some mysterious revelations, being asserted as an effect of the sensitized subconscious, guided towards exciting reveries.
...In fact we are in the company of a work characterized by a high spirituality suggesting the splendours of the natural eternal, alongside with the discreet integration of the human being in the stirring process of the universal becoming.


Ioan Iovan- Evanescenţe celeste şi luminozităţi palatine ( "Celestial Evanescences and Palatine Luminosities" ), Renaşterea Bănţeană,Timişoara ,17 octombrie 1996

... The images created by Virginia Baz Baroiu are illustratively drawn into a real poetics of vastity, a bottomless depth of the horizons and of the measureless heights... Between these unlimited openings there come into being diaphanous transient inventions, things belonging to dreams, floatings and evanscences, ethereal things and metamorphoses... Gorgeous displays, as if from the 1001nights allow themselves flooded by Palatine luminosities shaped by the transparences of a fairy-tale world.


Ioan Iovan- Utopii legitime ("Legitimate Utopias" ), Renaşterea Bănăţeană, Timişoara, 1 iulie 1997

...The images proposed exuberantly announce the detachment from daily occurrence and the irrevocable, limitless passage into dreaming. We are presented visual stories, visualised fairy-tales, escapes on the paths of the dream coming from a surplus of kindness. There exclusively rules the solar paradisiac calm, the smiling universal harmony...
This paradise above, asserts the superiority of the dream and the need of an essential victory of imagination. In compensatory position, the imaginary is a place of unloading the soul warmth; it is a point of convergence for the aspiration produced by the human performance. For, the boundless good, as well as the everlasting youth without old age, cannot be horizon with the four cardinal points but for the ones capable of dreaming. That is why Virginia Baz Baroiu's aquarelles may be considered as legitimate utopias; as long as there exists a poetics of the space and an attitudinal lyrics, it is possible for them to meet so as to offer something different from what we meet daily in the urban streets of our life, therefore doing us a lot of good which should quieten us and install peace for a moment.


Anghel Dumbrăveanu- Doamna culorilor celeste ( The Lady of Celestial Colours) Renaşterea Bănăţeană , Timişoara , 15 iulie 1997

Our great contemporary's art is a miracle; she is the Lady of celestial colours and the Lady of a unique kind of feeling and dreaming of a perpetually unknown world, ever richer and more fascinating, the magnificient world of Virginia Baz Baroiu's craftmanship and originality.

Ion Frunzetti, Mircea Deac, Dan Grigorescu, Theodor Redlow, Cornel Radu Constantinescu, Cristina Angelescu, Damian Ureche, Anghel Dumbraveanu, Marina Preutu, Vasile Dragut, Negoita Laptoiu, Octavian Barbosa, Dumitru Cristache, Valentin Ciuca, Emil Satco ,Ciprian Radovan, Deliu Petroiu, Ioan Iovan, Ion Ariesanu, Ion Marin Almajan, Ioan Jurca Rovina, Rodica Virtaciu, Ion Dinu, Radu Melnic and others

Contact: Timişoara, România
Phone: +40 (0)256 496247
Mobile: +40 (0)72 7355423
E-mail: baroi_roxana@yahoo.com
Web: uapt.cjtimis.ro/membri/vbazbaroiu

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Uniunea Artiştilor Plastici din România - Filiala Timişoara

Uniunea Artistilor Plastici din România - Filiala Timşsoara
  Copyright © 2013
Timişoara Branch of the Fine Arts Union of România

Timişoara Branch of the Fine Arts Union of România