CEAU - Christoph Büchel/Giovanni Carmine

Nicolae Ceausescu was Romania’s leader between 1965 and December 1989, assisted by his wife Elena. As a result of the personality cult characteristic of any dictatorship, within this period hundreds of portraits of Elena and Nicolae were realized by artists all over the country. CEAU is an artists book that presents a selection of these portraits preserved in the storage vaults of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. These artworks had either been commissioned by a variety of political bodies within the Socialist Republic of Romania or had been offered to the Ministry of Culture as a gift by the artists themselves before the fall of the Ceausescu regime. A transcript of the trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu on December 25, 1989 rounds off the publication.