Paul Neagu was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1938 and studied at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts. His work was prohibited during Ceaușescu’s regime and in 1979 he immigrated to London. His complex artistic practice integrated performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, video and photography, within his original, holistic, metaphysical view on art. Refuting what he perceived as the primacy of visuality within art, he produced tactile sculpture which was meant to be touched and handled.
Artist Paul Neagu was born on 22 February 1938 in Bucharest, Romania, spending his early years living under Stalinist military occupation in Timișoara and Bucharest. While studying at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts, he first experimented with abstract art, although social realism was the expected style. In 1968 and 1969 his work was shown in mixed exhibitions of Romanian art in Prague, Zurich, Paris, Turin and Hamburg. In 1969, when travel restrictions were briefly lifted by the Communist government, he was invited to exhibit at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland where he also produced the 'Palpable Art Manifesto'. Neagu refuted what he perceived as the primacy of visuality within art and this manifesto was the result of theories he had developed about palpable and tactile sculpture, often by representing them as box-like shapes with open/shut doors, made mostly from wood and leather covered in gesso, relating them to traditional Romanian woodwork. In the manifesto, Neagu called for 'one public, palpable art through which all the senses, sight, touch, smell, taste will supplement and devour each other so that a man can possess an object in every sense' (British Council website).
Neagu's work was prohibited during Ceaușescu’s regime and in 1979 he immigrated first to France, then Scotland, finally settling in London. Soon after his arrival, he found a supportive place at framer Sigi Krauss's shop in Covent Garden. The ground floor was used as an alternative art gallery, often made available at no cost for experimental artists, including Stuart Brisley and Marc Camille Chaimowicz. For some time, Neagu used a corner of the basement workshop as his studio. Unable to afford proper art materials, he scavenged discarded framing materials and other ephemera around him which he utilised to create his box-like objects. These fragile works incorporated low-quality materials such as empty matchboxes and dried polenta. Although in many ways Neagu’s artistic practice developed in parallel to that of his British contemporaries, and the forms and processes he used were manifest elsewhere (Duchampian boxed formats, edible and manipulable sculptures, ritualistic performance art), his work was also inspired by folk and religious art-objects from the Balkans and the Middle East. Neagu's philosophical approach led him to push the boundaries of abstraction. He also used his own body as a medium in his performance of ‘ritual’ events and his work often referred to embodied experience.
His early Tactile Objects and Palpable Objects, which Neagu made in Bucharest in 1968 and 1969 and in London in the early 1970, were first exhibited in Neagu’s solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1973. His sculptures engaged multiple senses, such as taste and touch, and were intended to spur interaction with the viewer. In his own words: 'You can take things in better, more completely, with your ten fingers, pores and mucous membranes than with only two eyes' (Yates, Culture Trip). In 1972 he set up the Generative Art Group with himself as group director, along with four other aliases, each representing different parts of his creative psyche and visionary world. This fictional group attracted funding and critical attention, enabling him to further experiment with a number of artistic forms, culminating with a show at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1976. Neagu's sculpture was intertwined with performance and film, and he began to explore Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and P. D. Ouspensky’s esotericism. The performance piece Gradually Going Tornado (1974) represented a major turning point in his artistic practice: a synesthetic show involving roller skating, dance, compartmentalising the body, and discarding clothes, revolving around the theme of central vortexes and spiral movement. He had a one-man exhibition at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (1974), followed by further major shows in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1979) and Serpentine Gallery (1987). Neagu was also a teacher, lecturing at Hornsey, the Slade, and Chelsea School of Art, and in 1976 he became Associate Professor at the Royal College of Art, London. Among his notable students there were Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread. He also displayed his own work and that of other artists in a building on Shaftesbury Avenue, in central London. Neagu became a British citizen in 1977, while also retaining his Romanian citizenship.
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Paul Neagu died of a stroke in London, England in 2004 and was buried, according to his wishes, in Timișoara. His works and documentation of his performances are in numerous UK public collections and archives, including the British Museum, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 2003 Tate Britain acquired his 30-year archive and exhibited works from the 1970s and 1980s. His oral testimony his held by the British Library and a portrait photograph is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.