The compartment "Painting" of the Gallery comprises a selection of representative works of eleven plastic artists from the Republic of Moldova that belong to some generations.
From the point of view of chronology the Gallery is "opened" by Mihai Grecu's work "Maternity", painted still in the period of World War II, having been continued by the works of the master's colleagues of the same generation from Chisinau and by the works of the youngest ones. The "last" works of the Gallery overpass the frontiers between the centuries being painted in the period of 2001 - 2002.
Every selected author is marked by his distinct personal language and by the contribution brought in the development of painting from the Republic of Moldova. Thus, Valentina-Rusu Ciobanu, Ada Zevin and Eleonora Romanescu are together with Mihai Grecu among the acknowledged masters that still discharged the painting of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic from the "rigour" of the so-called "socialist academism" at the end of the 50-es and the beginning of the 60-es.
Many of the works of those artists have already become "anthological" and the notion of "the School of Moldavian Painting from Bessarabia" cannot be conceived. The reintroduction into the professional painting of the folk art language, naive art, the revaluation of the national plastic folklore is due to them.
The pleiad of the artists of the generation of the sixties of the XX century is exemplified by the works of the talented colourust Elena Bontea and of the regretted painter and monumentalist Aurel David, author of the known picture "Noon".
The authors born in the years after World War II, among whom it is necessary to mention Ludmila Toncev and Inessa Tapin, each of them contributed in her own way to the establishing of a completely thrilling manner, emotive and energetic in the easel painting.
Complete freedom of expressive means, the intrinsic value of the artistic work with its colouristic valences (proclaimed so far in the sixties by Mihai Grecu) constituted that foundation which stood at the basis of the regretted Andrei Sarbu - initially a disciple of Mihai Grecu, subsequently an absolute independent and original personality.
The ascetic and purified forms promoted in painting by Mihai Tarus in his works in the last two decades certify a refined taste and complex problems specific to the generations of the 80-ies and 90-ies.
Tudor Zbarnea professes in his works of the last ten-fifteen years a painting in which the overwhelming role is granted to the chromatic instrumentation and compositional complexity of the picture.
In general, we must mention that painting in the Republic of Moldova traversed a devious road full of extra artistic gift and victories of the creating spirit in the last half of a century. This road having been begun in unpropitious conditions of a totalitary regime with total reglementation of all human activities has covered periods of liberalizations or aggravations of restrictions imposed on arts and only at the end of eighties and the beginning of nineties has the state control over the creative activity totally disappeared together with the collapse of the communist regimes and the Soviet Union.
Mihail Grecu
