418 Contemporary Art Gallery

418 Contemporary Art Gallery opened in 2008 in Bucharest, Romania.

The founders are Dr. Joana Grevers, an art historian with Romanian roots and Guy K. Williamson, an American art collector. During the last years the profile of the gallery has focused in two distinct directions. On one hand promoting young cutting edge Romanian artists: like sculptor/composer Cristian Raduta from Bucharest, kinetic art sculptor Stefan Radu Cretu from Sibiu, figurative painter Anca Bodea from Cluj, the Timisoara based young abstract painter Petrica Stefan and the surrealistic painter Maria Manea from Bucharest. On the other hand, the gallery is dedicated to the survey of the Romanian avant-garde of the 60s, a period when realistic socialism was imposed by the communist regime. During this oppressive system, very few artists where daring to go another path, the path of “abstraction behind the iron curtain”. From Timisoara, Romul Nutiu develops his form of abstract expressionism, Diet Sayler (Timisoara/Nurnberg) and Roman Cotosman (Timisoara/Philadelphia) focus on geometrical abstraction; Vincentiu Gigorescu (Bucharest/Milano) shows an early inclination towards geometrical abstraction in painting and then focuses on the materiality of the canvas itself; Sorel Etrog (Jassy/Toronto) renowned diaspora abstract sculptor. The gallery’s vision is to bring out internationally our young artists and to introduce them. Our goal is to create a solid and reliable profile of a Bucharest-based contemporary art gallery in the emerging art market from South-Eastern Europe.

The 418 gallery together with the Joana Grevers Foundation sustains every summer since 2008 the Cetate Arts Danube artists in residence event, where five to eight artists are invited to work on the former family estate.