Horia Bernea

Painter of hills, columns and sacred light; refounder of the Peasant Museum.

Bernea's cycles — 'Hills', 'Columns', 'Banners', 'Pantocrator' — explore light and the sacred through repeated motifs. After 1990 he became the director of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, reinventing it as one of Europe's most poetic ethnographic museums (European Museum of the Year, 1996).