From NY Arts magazine.
In 2004, when Romania inaugurated its first-ever National Museum of Contemporary Art in Ceausescu’s nightmarish Peoples Palace, Dumitru Gorzo contributed a large painting depicting the palace on fire while two thugs knife a peasant —a tableau based on a folkloric legend of the Carpathian mountains. Although Gorzo was among many artists displaying both humor and hatred toward everything Ceausescu stood for, his piece provoked the most controversy. Such is the task of the Romanian artist: to attempt fresh creation in a place that for 50 years was aesthetically desecrated and forced into submission before a deadly prole-cultism in art, architecture and art-criticism.