Tudor Cataraga


Tudor Cataraga was a sculptor from the Republic of Moldova.

Biography

From 1981 to 1984, Cataraga was a student in the sculpture department at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. As a graduate student at the same Institution, he worked with Professor Sergey Kubasov. He became a member of the Union of Artists of Moldova in 1993 and of the International Association of Arts in 1997. In 2000, he was named chair of the Sculpture Department of the Union of Artists of Moldova. In 2011, Cataraga and his wife were killed in a car accident.

Awards

"...As a starting point for the understanding of the artist's repertory of shapes, I would suggest two monuments: Monument to Ion Dumeniuc, The Guarding Angel and Mihai Eminescu , both of them representing visual arguments of a precise spiritual and historical identity.
The first monument is characteristic for the religious, spiritual aspect, always present in the sculptor's work. We can place the Guarding Angel project, first executed in baked clay and in a smaller form in 1990, into a larger family of works: Prayer and Sound of Sadness . The "simplicity as a resolved complexity" Brancusi is an important key for the understanding of these works.
...for the monument to Mihai Eminescu, Tudor Cataraga selects only abstract principles, imagining a "cosmic" portrait of the national genius. Far more modern in visual expression, the sculptor is now free to play with three-dimensional elements and he conceives a rhythmical network that concentrates in the poet's figure /symbolic nucleus, without stirring the space, but comprimating. This second direction of his research, his playing with neo-expressionist forms can be seen in a series of his recent experimental works: The Woman-Crossbow , The Man-Bird , Motherhood .
Tenacious in his research leading him from deductive to inductive thinking, without any disruption from his way, the sculptor's interest is gradually sliding to architectural constructions, and constructivism. The ever more pregnant abstract trend, the play with geometrical modules epitomise his fascination with the assemblage and with the rich relation "entity-detail": Genesis , Masterpiece . Tudor Cataraga, in his full artistic maturity, has the energy and the firm gesture of an inquisitive and attentive sculptor".
Oana Tanase – Art critic,
Bucharest

Monumental Works