Geta Brătescu

Geta Brătescu (Ploiești, 1926 - Bucharest, 2018) was a Romanian visual artist who worked in drawing, collage, photography, performance, illustration and film. Her work matters because it explored personal identity from within the intimacy of her studio, under a regime that suppressed radical forms of aesthetic expression.

She studied literature at the University of Bucharest and painting with Camil Ressu at the Academy of Fine Arts, from which she was expelled before graduating because of her family background, her parents being property owners. She returned to study at the "Nicolae Grigorescu" Institute of Fine Arts between 1969 and 1971. The relationship between writing and image runs through much of her production.

In the 1970s, as censorship pushed artists to work in private, her collage Censored Self Portrait (1978) shows her with her mouth and eyes sealed by a strip of paper. In the same decade she made the studio her subject in The Studio (1978), a film made with Ion Grigorescu. In the 1980s she began working with textiles, which she described as "drawing with a sewing machine". The line is a constant feature of her work, and the Jeu des Formes series continued this investigation.

She was selected to represent Romania at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and in 2015 she held her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, at Tate Liverpool. Her legacy is that of an artist who made drawing, writing and the body tools of critical thought.