Darius Hulea is a Romanian artist who is famous for his masterful portraits made from iron, stainless steel, copper and brass wires.
He combines elements of both contemporary and classical art to create beautiful sculptures.
He creates portraits of famous historical figures, poets and philosophers. Darius first took interest in art when he got inspired to the folk crafts found in his village during his youth. His grandmother and great grandmother wove traditional geometric fabrics and he worked with agricultural tools and was a wood craftsman.
“The portrait gallery does not explain or tell in any way the metaphysical dimension of the heroic existence of each of the persons portrayed, does not explain a being because explaining a being means abolishing it, reducing it to nothing but making it true by putting something from the glorious nature of the one who embodies them,” Darius told the media.
He finds artistic freedom by working in metal as this material has almost no limitations. The artist uses wires of differing widths to translate the quick pencil strokes of a sketch.
Darius told My Modern Met: “I discovered during my second year of college that the great artists of modern history used the principle of drawing in space or drawing the space through different metallic structures,”
“Some, like Picasso, used recycled materials or, like Calder or David Smith, industrial materials.
That moment was the turning point of the sculptures that I am doing now. For me, this type of drawing is what we find in the sketches of the great artists of the Renaissance like Michelangelo and Da Vinci—serious and realistic compositions that anyone can understand.
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“I hope that people will understand that I do nothing but draw in a new way, in a durable material of the past,” Hulea shares. “I can then explore and research, as an artist, mythical, Renaissance, and modern thinking by finding three-dimensional examples that describe us now in a history of the past.”