A painter, architect, graphic designer and scenographer of Jewish origin, was born in Bucharest, where he and his high-school colleagues Tristan Tzara (pseudonym of Samuel Rosenstock) and Ion Vinea founded the magazine Simbolul. He later studied architecture in Zürich, where he was part of the group that set up the Dada movement, alongside Tristan Tzara and others. After a period in Paris, where he came into contact with the European artistic avant-garde, he returned to Romania in 1922. Here, on the pages of Contimporanul, he presented his aesthetic views on the new life of the city, founded alongside Ion Vinea. In 1948, together with painters Yosef Zaritsky and Yehezkel Streichman, he founded the Orizonturi Noi group, which laid the foundations for the development of Israeli moderate painting. He also exercised an intense pedagogical activity, promoting European modernism in Israeli art.

Marcel Iancu was at the origin of the Dada movement, which he co-founded with Tristan Tzara. A freedom-loving movement that flouted all conventions, Dada broke aesthetic standards. Iancu gradually broke away from the movement, abandoning symmetry and being influenced by cubism and constructivism, and the painting in the exhibition reflects these experiments: compositions inspired by cubism and constructivism.