Paul Neagu

Works in the Tate collection.

… But Paul Neagu’s hyphen raises an important question: does the hyphen force the union, as it were, or does it merely propose and suggest its possibility? Does it express the wish for togetherness or its reality? Does the hyphen acknowledge an inherent tendency to unity among incommensurate things – but not necessarily its realization does the hyphen convey the actuality and durability of unity?…

Cake-Man Event

Drawings

The Romanian sculptor Paul Neagu, who has died aged 66, spent a life-time exploring the philosophical themes in sculpture. His work as both a teacher and a practitioner influenced a whole generation of British artists. Like his great mentor, Constantin Brancusi, Neagu had to make a difficult emotional journey from Romania to the west. He arrived in Britain in the Seventies at a time when there were very few artists working in a cross-cultural context. Inevitably, he struggled against a British art world that preferred to see the artist as a maker of things rather than, as he saw it, art, and therefore the artist, as a generator of a philosophical world view…