Estructura 

Sandu Darie created this untitled ‘Estructura’, or ‘Structure’, with painted wood, sometime in the mid to late twentieth century. Darie worked in Cuba and Romania in the post-war period, where he developed this geometric abstract style. The work reflects wider trends in modernist art. It uses simple shapes and colours to create a sense of visual harmony. The artwork seeks to transcend the everyday by creating a universal visual language. But this was also a period of intense political division. Darie was working in Communist Romania, where artists were expected to create works that served the state. Was a non-representational work such as this a subtle form of resistance? It is possible that Darie wanted to produce work that existed outside this ideological framework. To understand this artwork better, we need to do further research into Darie's biography, the history of Romanian art institutions, and the critical discourse around abstraction in the Eastern Bloc. The meaning of art is always contingent on its social context.