Paul Neagu

Paul Neagu (1938-2004) was a Romanian artist living in England who worked in diverse media such as drawing, sculpture, performance art and watercolor. He died on 16 June 2004 in London.[1][2][3][4]

His influences included Cubism, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brâncuși and Joseph Beuys.

His works can be found in public collections including, among others, the British Museum, London, le Fond départemental d'art contemporain, Seine Saint-Denis, Bobigny, France, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, the Musee Cantonal de Beaux Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, the National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, the Philadelphia Art Museum, Philadelphia, USA, and the Tate Gallery, London.

One of his works, Going Tornado (1974), was used as an album cover for the Bruford album Gradually Going Tornado from 1980.

"For Paul Neagu, art is an expression of 'desire in the face of the systems that attempt to inhibit it', as he writes, and desire involves 'the recovery' of what he calls, variously, the 'hyphen,' the 'abstract', the 'gamma', all of which involve the 'bodily', conveyed particularly through the 'figural essence of sculpting, paintings, drawings'. Neagu's works, whatever their medium, are certainly full of desire, as their visceral energy suggests." Donald Kuspit