Among the Romanian painters of the last half of a century, Sultana Maitec (1928 – 2016) had an atypical path: the artist opted, since the early 60s, when socialist realism was the only admitted expression validated by the system, for the non-figurative painting in gold leaf, which meant in fact choosing her own path of opposition and resistance against the dominant ideology of her time. Living in the „golden age”, therefore, Sultana Maitec would choose therefore precisely gold as a media, and, through this option, she will save her work from any interference with the obligation, for an artist of that time, to depict a world which was, in fact, impossible to represent.
