Paul Neagu (1938–2004) was a romanian-british artist, born in Romania and living in England from 1970 onwards, who worked in diverse media such as drawing, sculpture, performance art and watercolor.
[1][2][3][4] His influences included Cubism, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brâncuși and Joseph Beuys.
His works can be found in public collections including, among others, the British Museum, London, le Fond départemental d'art contemporain, Seine Saint-Denis, Bobigny, France, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, the Musee Cantonal de Beaux Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, the National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA, and the Tate Gallery, London.
One of the works in Tate's collection, 36 Possibilities Realised Simultaneously, dating 1973–74, reflects a variety of styles, from oil paint, pencil, ink and gesso.
"For Paul Neagu, art is an expression of 'desire in the face of the systems that attempt to inhibit it', as he writes, and desire involves 'the recovery' of what he calls, variously, the 'hyphen,' the 'abstract', the 'gamma', all of which involve the 'bodily', conveyed particularly through the 'figural essence of sculpting, paintings, drawings'.