Augustin Costinescu

(b. 28 April 1943, Lipova, Arad County, Romania – d. 11 March 2021, Bucharest, Romania)

Augustin Costinescu was a Romanian painter and draughtsman whose work is distinguished by an expressive use of color, a strong attachment to figurative painting, and a highly personal interpretation of the visible world. Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, he developed a recognizable pictorial language in which landscapes, urban scenes, portraits, still lifes, and figures became vehicles for chromatic and emotional exploration.

Born in Lipova, Arad County, in 1943, Costinescu studied painting at the “Nicolae Grigorescu” Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, graduating in 1969. His professors included Aurel Vlad, Ion Marșic, and Ion Popescu-Negreni. He made his early exhibition debut in Oradea in 1968 and, following graduation, participated extensively in national salons, biennials, group exhibitions, and solo presentations. In 1973, he became a full member of the Union of Fine Artists of Romania.

Costinescu remained fundamentally connected to figurative art, yet his approach moved beyond straightforward representation. His compositions frequently transform observed reality through intense color, simplification, and elements of abstraction, creating images in which atmosphere and emotional experience become as important as the subject itself. Contemporary criticism described his practice as extending the chromatic traditions of Romanian interwar and postwar painting while incorporating modern processes of abstraction.

Color occupies a central place in his work. Rather than treating the subject as an end in itself, Costinescu approached painting as an organization of the pictorial surface through chromatic relationships, balance, and the elimination of unnecessary detail. The result is an art rooted in reality but transformed by the artist's subjective experience, often characterized by luminosity, spontaneity, and a distinctly poetic quality.

Over the course of his career, Costinescu exhibited extensively in Romania and internationally. His solo exhibitions included presentations in Bucharest, Oradea, Cluj-Napoca, Iași, Constanța, Craiova, Paris, and Budapest, among others. His works entered museum and private collections in Romania as well as collections throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, and other countries. The Romanian Cultural Institute notes the presence of his works in the National Museum of Art in Bucharest and numerous international collections.

Augustin Costinescu died in Bucharest on 11 March 2021, leaving behind an extensive body of painting and drawing defined by its chromatic vitality and its continuous dialogue between observed reality and artistic transformation.