While the name might not say much to art lovers, Victor Zambrea was not only an interesting and highly original artist, but also a painter with a fascinating biography : a victim of Soviet Communism, deported and emprisoned for his anti-USSR activites, he used the terrifying experience of the Gulag in his works, evoking in countless, impressive compositions the horrors, atrocities and nightmares of that space.
Born in Bessarabia in 1924, Victor Zambrea first discovered arts by means of the folk traditions, motifs and techniques, which offered him a splendid universe to explore. After highschool, deciding he wanted to be a painter, Zambrea enrolled at the Fine Arts School in Bucharest, in the troublesome year of 1941. With the involvement of Romania in WW II, against the USSR, Zambrea felt the need to fight on the battlefront, convinced he was fighting for Bessarabia. The artist enrolled at the Royal Navy's School of Scuba diving, an interesting choice, but didn't get to actually fight.
Arrested at the end of 1944 by the Soviet Secret Police, detained in a camp in Chisinau, he managed to get free in 1945 and went to Ismail, his birthplace, where he joined a local anti-Communist movement, a resistance group. The artist had become a political activist, who would be once again arrested, then broke free, and once again, in the summer of 1949, arrested and deported to Siberia. Gone were the days during which he gave everything to his art, it seemed that the Soviet governement would execute him. It was close, and only after the death of Stalin, in 1953, he could escape deathroll.
Liberated in 1958, he settled down in Chisinau and returned with full force to the world of painting and drawing, working in the beginning at the University Central Store. A menial job, as he was limited by the oficial rules and themes, but for the artist it was a chance of working, perfecting his style, learning new techniques, discovering new artists, even if he had to make his own compositions in his spare time. It was a long time of experimenting and creating, errors and achievements, a time when the former prisoner prepared an universe of evocations and rememberance.
He would retire only in 1984, after working as a painter also for the Plastic Arts Fund, already a well known artist, yet not so much promoted as he sould have been. Nevertheless, he had the chance of exhibition on several occasions, after 1954, with some success. It was only in 1994 that he had his "revenge" upon the Soviet Communist regime, when he had a large solo exhibition in Chisinau, "Bessarabian Romanians Deported to Siberia". It was a beautiful, touching and dramatic rememberance of the nightmare that many went through, the nightmare that killed thousands of people, and that Victor Zambrea brought before the visitor through his works.
The artist passed away in 2000.
2008-08-13
