Marin Gherasim was a central figure in Romanian post-war painting, whose work united structural rigour with a metaphysical reflection on memory and sacred space. Educated at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he later taught, he was also active as an art historian at the Institute of Art History of the Romanian Academy. His long academic career shaped several generations of artists, while his painting evolved through a series of conceptual cycles - Proteic, Urban, The Road, The Gates, The Apses, Memory of the Apse and Reconstruction of the Apse.

Gherasim’s art stemmed from a sustained meditation on architecture and spirituality, seeking to rebuild, ...