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Geta Bratescu, Adventuresome Romanian Artist, Is Dead at 92

Geta Bratescu with some of her work. She worked in collage, film, installation and assorted other forms.Credit...Felicia Simion for The New York Times

Geta Bratescu, a Romanian artist who made experimental, often humorous works even during the most oppressive years of Communism and of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, but who remained largely unknown outside Romania until she was in her 80s, died on Sept. 19 at her home in Bucharest. She was 92.

The Hauser & Wirth gallery, which represented her, confirmed the death.

Mrs. Bratescu, who worked in collage, film, installation and assorted other forms, found herself sought after by curators late in life after a few high-profile exhibitions, including solo shows at the Tate Liverpool in England in 2015 and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany in 2016. In 2017 she represented Romania at the Venice Biennale.

Yet as prolific and adventuresome as she was, and as tumultuous as the times she lived through were, she was not given to lengthy discourses on theory or the relationship between art and politics.

“A project gets created at the work desk, not in the head,” she told the online arts magazine The Calvert Journal last year in a typically sparse comment. “Art is form.”

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“The Lines and the Circle,” a 2012 work by Geta Bratescu.Credit...Stefan Sava, via Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, and Hauser & Wirth

Georgeta Ana Comanescu was born on May 4, 1926, in Ploiesti, north of Bucharest. Her parents, Gheorghe and Ana (Antonescu) Comanescu, were pharmacists who owned their own drugstore.

Their proprietorship affected her when the country came under Soviet influence and Communist control after World War II. In 1945 she had enrolled at the University of Bucharest and also at the Belle Arte School, but in 1949 she was expelled from the art school — though not, she said, because of the quality of her work.

“The real problem was my father — a capitalist, in their terms,” Mrs. Bratescu said in a 2013 interview with the journal ARTmargins. Only in 1969 would she be able to resume her studies there; she received a degree in 1971.

The expulsion did not stop her from working. In the 1950s she illustrated children’s books and other publications, and late in that decade she became a member of the Union of Fine Artists, a state organization that sent its members all over the country to study and sketch “the life of the socialist man,” as she put it.

“The factory workers would keep a stool for me in the factory hall, and I would sit and observe what went on there, working along with them,” she recalled. “I not only went to steelwork plants, but also to the Danube Delta. I will never forget the homage of a fisherman who, in learning why I was there, laid a giant fish at my feet.”

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“Aesop Drawings Book” (1967), by Geta Bratescu.Credit...Timothy Doyon, via Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, and Hauser & Wirth

The resulting sketches were exhibited in two solo shows in Bucharest in the early 1960s. In 1963 Mrs. Bratescu began working for Secolul 20, a Romanian culture magazine, as its graphic designer, a role she filled for 20 years.

In the 1970s she experimented with photography, though not in the usual sense — the photographs were generally taken by her husband, Mihai Bratescu, an engineer whom she married in 1951. “I like to play, to be in front of the camera,” she explained.

And she created films. One from this period is “The Studio” (1978), a short black-and-white film made in her own modest studio, in which “she alternately dreams, works and plays while the camera explores the space,” as Roberta Smith of The New York Times put it when she reviewed a 2014 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in which the work was included.

The 1980s brought more collage and textile art — “drawing with scissors” or “drawing with a sewing machine,” as she sometimes described it. She continued to work until her death, producing quirky, hard-to-categorize pieces in a variety of mediums.

Mrs. Bratescu once made a collage using wrappers from chocolates she had eaten. She turned her mother’s old clothing into textile collages. Ice cream sticks, old newspapers, pieces of toilet paper, empty cigarette cartons all turned up in her collages. “The sanctification of waste,” she once called the practice.

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Mrs. Bratescu in her studio in Bucharest last year. “A project gets created at the work desk, not in the head,” she said.Credit...Felicia Simion for The New York Times

One thing she rarely did, though — setting her apart from many of her fellow Romanian artists — was paint.

“I can appreciate it,” she said of painting, “but it’s not in my nature.”

Mrs. Bratescu exhibited in Bucharest and elsewhere in Romania throughout her career, regardless of the oft-changing political situation there. In an interview with The Times this year, Sebestyen Gyorgy Szekely, an art historian who specializes in female Eastern European artists, credited her preference for “unpolitical art” with keeping her above the political fray.

She often drew inspiration from antiquity rather than current events, as she did for “The Leaps of Aesop,” her first solo show in New York, seen at Hauser & Wirth last year and, this year, at the firm’s Los Angeles gallery.

Mrs. Bratescu’s husband died in 2012. She is survived by a son, Tudor, and a grandson.

Though she rebelled at efforts to categorize her, Mrs. Bratescu was often called a Conceptualist. Asked how she felt about that description, she sought to bring the focus back to the process of making art.

“Using a metaphor, I see these things exactly as a surgeon does while performing surgery,” she said. “I cannot label my surgery. I work, that’s all.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Geta Bratescu, 92, Romanian Artist Who Dazzled the West in Her 80s, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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