Temporary Exhibitions
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
— Pablo Picasso
In recent years, the National Museum of Art of Moldova has enriched its painting collections with works by foreign contemporary artists. Since 2009, the International Painting Biennale has been held in Chișinău, and the awarded works are transferred to the museum’s collection, thus contributing to its ongoing renewal with representative creations of 21st-century art.
The exhibition brings together 36 works by artists from Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine, as well as from Egypt, Cuba, Mongolia, China, and Japan.
The works that have entered the museum’s collection over recent decades allow for an in-depth study of the evolution of contemporary art, highlighting both shared characteristics and the distinct features of artistic schools from different cultural contexts.
The general trends of contemporary painting include the rejection of traditional concepts of space, classical compositional planes, and the dominant role of drawing. Color and the painterly stroke—symbols and expressions of modern painting—gain primary importance. “Colors, like facial features, follow the changes of emotions,” wrote Pablo Picasso. Indeed, artists seek to emotionally engage the viewer through color.
Twentieth-century modernism marked a decisive transformation of traditional pictorial values, and 21st-century art continues this trajectory, moving toward further experimentation. Painting is no longer a closed composition confined by the frame, but an open, free space, unrestrained by conventions. “An artist paints not what he sees, but what he feels,” stated Pablo Picasso—an idea echoed by Wassily Kandinsky: “An artist must have something to say, for his task is not to master form, but to adapt this form to the content.”
Contemporary artists are drawn not only to emotions, feelings, and personal worldviews, but also to new technologies and the possibilities offered by scientific progress and digitalization. The themes of their works have moved away from traditional genres, addressing current issues such as identity, globalization, and democracy. In this context, conventional titles such as Untitled frequently appear, inviting the public to a free interpretation and a personal immersion in the interplay of space and color.
Contemporary art implies a rethinking of history and religion, an interweaving of cultures, unexpected transformations of pictorial space, and bold experiments with paint layers, volume, and form.
Alongside abstract compositions, the exhibition also includes works with a conditionally realistic approach, such as Dream Landscape. Florida by Austrian artist Doris Dittrich, Rebirth by Italian painter Constantin Migliorini, and Still Life with an Articulated Doll and a Waving Cat by German master Dirk Balke. Ukrainian artists Anatolii Melnik and Oleksandr Bazyuk propose a synthesis of figurative and abstract painting, using stylized silhouettes and addressing contemporary themes imbued with deep inner meaning.
The inner world of the artists—their identity and individual experience—is fully revealed to the public in contemporary art exhibitions. Each work calls not only for visual perception, but also for imagination, immersion in the universe of conceptual art, a careful study of lines, silhouettes, and color fields, and the discovery of profound beauty. As Wassily Kandinsky stated, “Beautiful is what responds to an inner spiritual need.”
