The Liviu Suhar Art Collection

Liviu Suhar was born on 17 February 1943 at Iacobeni, and left for the art schools: the „Octav Băncilă” high school in Iași, then the „Ion Andreescu” Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca, which he finished in 1968. He joined the Union of Visual Artists in 1970 and was dean of the Faculty of Visual Arts, Decorative Arts and Design in Iași between 1990 and 2000, where he also ran the doctoral school. The commune he was born in made him an honorary citizen.

In 2011 he founded the „Artă și Educație Liviu Suhar” association, and through it brought a painting camp back to his own village.

The camp the collection came from

The painting and drawing symposium „Iacobeni – particularități imagistice” is held by the association together with the town hall. The rule of the camp is plain: the artists get board, lodging and materials, and in return they leave two works, one of which enters the property of Iacobeni town hall while the other stays with the association. The fourth edition was held in August 2015, with 18 participants, up at the Mestecăniș pass; the seventh, in August 2022, at the town hall itself.

Edition after edition, this camp built up the commune's collection: about 70 works, according to the local press, signed by artists from all over the country. A volume by Carmen Țita gathers the first editions of the symposium.

How the collection is seen

The works belong to the commune and are kept at the town hall. There is no exhibition space with an address of its own and posted opening times, so a visit is arranged with the town hall before you come. Anyone looking on a map for an open gallery will not find one: this is a public collection, not a museum with the door always unlocked.

There is also, separately, a private museum the painter gathered in his old family house in the village. In it he gathered objects collected over decades. That one belongs to the family and carries no visiting information; it is not the same thing as the works held by the commune.

Suhar, not Suhard

The painter's name is spelled Suhar. The Suhard is the mountain across the water, and the confusion between the two circulated for years on lists of the commune's sights. His name, spelled properly, is also carried by the village school and the technological high school in Iacobeni, the former mining school where the miners' children studied.