(b Calinesti, 1932). Romanian sculptor. He studied with Cornel Medrea at the Nicolae Grigorescu Academy of Art in Bucharest and graduated in 1959. He made his début in 1961 at the annual Salon of Painting and Sculpture in Bucharest. From that date he attended many important national and international exhibitions, and also a series of symposia as a representative of Romania, including the Venice Biennale of 1972. His work belongs to a significant trend in Romanian post-Stalinist sculpture: he attempted to synthesize the essential qualities of Brancusi with a fictitious organic primitivism that was intended to resemble the characteristic features of the wooden tools and domestic objects used in a traditional peasant household. Iliescu-Calinesti’s symbolic repertory focused on myths of germination, fertility and the solar cult, deriving from archaic popular beliefs. The energy with which he continually increased his production made him the most active exponent of sculpture in wood in Romania.