Ion Grigorescu, born in 1945 in Bucharest where he lives and works, is an iconic figure of performance and conceptual art in Romania. Along with fellow Eastern European artists such as Jiří Kovanda, Július Koller, Mladen Stilinović, or the late Tibor Hajas, Ion Grigorescu is increasingly acclaimed for his role in effectively cultivating resistance, and underground, clandestine art under Communist totalitarianism. As a forerunner of the conceptual and performative use of the body as an artistic medium in Romania since the early 1970s, Grigorescu is also one of the very few Romanian artists who have radically and conceptually illustrated contemporary concerns in perfect synchronicity with his time. Grigorescu has made an invaluable contribution to the shaping of a critical consciousness capable of articulating a genuinely universal critique in rationalist-discursive, performative, and artistic terms.
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