Graduating from the Bucharest Institute of Plastic Arts in 1955, he left the country for Switzerland in 1977. Hardly a fan of genre painting, he turned to collage, objects and environments, preferring to recontextualize with traditional means and materials or those taken directly from nature, or with ancestral techniques. In the realization of his projects, which he has repeated over the years, he has directed his attention to the expressive potential of unconventional materials and to the relationship between object and (natural) space.

To create contemporary art objects and art installations, Pavel Ilie has used unexpected materials and techniques inspired by traditional practices. La Bombe is a work in plaster, clay and tempera which, at the height of the Cold War, takes the form of the atomic bomb. As for the 1971 photograph of a hay crate standing next to a metal structure, it was produced at a crucial moment in Romania’s history – the end of a brief period of liberalization under the Communist regime, and the beginning of strict control and severe socio-cultural censorship.