artist/ BARUCH

Roumanie

Marion Baruch was born in Timisoara in 1929. In 1948, she began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, which at the time was heavily controlled by the Stalinist regime. The following year, she had the exceptional opportunity to emigrate to Israel. She continued her studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, attending classes taught by Mordecai Ardon, an artist from the Bauhaus school and a student of Paul Klee. Four years later, she exhibited at the Micra-Studio Gallery in Tel Aviv, where the highly positive reviews enabled her to obtain a scholarship, thanks to which she moved to Italy in 1954, where she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

This journey, rich and marked by constant new encounters but also by sudden upheavals, is reflected in her painting, often described as “highly expressive,” which continued to evolve, astonishing the critics of the time. The latter struggled to classify her talent, from A. Mann, critic for the Tel Aviv newspaper Maariv, to Lionello Venturi, who wrote about her following her solo exhibition at “La Cupola” in Rome. Her teacher, Roberto Melli, sensed the explosive nature of Marion Baruch’s developing language, writing: “I do not know what the future holds for this artist (I deliberately do not say painter), whether her strengths will enable her to achieve the goals to which her passionate nature, her intuition for pictorial facts, and the specific guidelines of modern painting aspire.”