Ioan Popoiu is a Romanian painter, and architectural draftsman, living with his family on Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens, where ships pass down parallel channels of the East River as if coming down the next block. Mr. Popoiu comes from Bucharest, where he took his Bachelors’ Degree in Fine Arts during intellectually risky years, attending Nicholae Grigorescu Academy of the Fine Arts, where the sculptor Brancusi taught eighty years ago. In Romania, he won awards at the National Competition for Graphic Arts in 1972, and at the National Competition for Fine Arts in 1978.

Popoiu’s artwork explores the abstract field in its most mysterious vein : opening doors into both dark and light areas of the canvas, where creative energies reveal intuitive perceptions of inexplicable harmonies, intentions, and depths of energy. Forms emerge from centers of dark coiled chaos, making new associations -- making conscious an on-going metamorphosis.

"Metaphor of Nature" acrylic on canvas 24 x 24"

"Today, at the end of the century," he says, "the concept of abstraction does not have the same meaning as it did. Now, all the elements used are part of our immediate reality: lines, textures, shapes, colors, tones. The vocabulary is in permanent change, but has organic continuity. It is an exploration which may have no ending point, as is the act of creation, where shapes form naturally, with elements and textures of reality and metaphor..."

In Bucharest, Popoiu first showed his paintings in 1975 in a show in the Municipal Exhibition space. In 1978, his draftsmanship was featured in Studio 35 "Drawings" show, and in 1983, in a guided art tour through the working spaces of five painters.

Popoiu came to live in New York City in 1984, when it was arranged to display his work in a one-person show at Morin Miller Gallery. After a five year wait following his exit application, he undertook a forty-day hunger strike before finally being granted permission to leave Soviet Romania.

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum included him in its 1990 exhibition of contemporary Eastern European painters. In the same year, his work was auctioned in "Christie’s Benefit to the Children of Romania." He is in museum collections in Bucharest and Minneapolis, and currently in the group show at the World Bank Auditorium, Washington, D.C.

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