Ovidiu Maitec was born in Arad in 1925. He studied at the Institutul de Arte Plastice ‘Nicolae Grigorescu’ in Bucharest (1945–1950) and, shortly after graduating, co-founded the Union of Plastics Fine Arts in Romania (1950). During his studies, he was a teaching assistant in the institute’s artistic anatomy department (1950–1956).
Just like Constantin Brâncuși – to whom he is often compared as the master’s most legitimate successor – Maitec was among the rare Romanian artists allowed to travel abroad during the harsh communist era, which explains his presence at the Venice Biennales of 1968, 1972 and 1980, among other international exhibitions such as: the Romanian Art Today exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival (1971); an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, (1973); exhibitions at the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, UK and The Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK (1974); and an exhibition at the Alwin Gallery, London, UK (1977).
His debut on the contemporary art scene came in 1953 when he participated in an exhibition, but his signature style truly developed between 1961 and 1962 when he started producing wood carvings, inspired by a trip abroad. The Wall, a piece from this period, can be understood as his stylistic manifesto, whereby he distanced himself from figurative realism and began to explore non-figurative kinetic sculpture, first in an expressionist manner, then in a constructivist-minimalist style, introducing perforation as a technical innovation. This was Maitec’s way of ‘introducing light into matter.’
On Christmas Eve 1989, during the Romanian Revolution, Maitec’s studio was almost completely destroyed in a blaze as a result of crossfire. The tragedy, in which he lost around 70 wood and bronze sculptures, his library, his tools and a large part of his personal archive, including his correspondence, had an enormous impact on his life. Following this tragedy, Maitec was invited to Paris by the French Ministry of Culture, which placed at his disposal a studio and a public commission. An exhibition in his honour was housed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris the very same year.
The shock of the loss of his studio brought about a change of vision in the final phase of the sculptor’s career, which he presented in solo exhibitions at the Catacomba Gallery in Bucharest, Romania, in 1996, Museum Arad in Arad, Romania, in 1998, the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest in 2011, and the Publishing House of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest in 2006.
His work has travelled to Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade, Berlin, Athens, Ankara, Istanbul, Damascus, Moscow, Paris, Helsinki, Rome, Hamburg, Stockholm, Tehran, London, Cairo, Stuttgart, New Delhi and Medellín, among many, many other places.
Maitec passed away in Paris in 2007, shortly before the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest was to house the exhibition Bitzan, Maitec, Mitroi, Nicodim. The exhibition in question was subsequently shown at the gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute in London in 2011 under the new title ‘Four Faces of Modernity: Bitzan, Maitec, Mitroi, Nicodim’.
