Radu Serban was born in 1943 in Bucharest, Romania, into a family of artists. Ever since he was a child, Radu enjoyed drawing and painting and at the young age of nine, he started taking painting classes. It was an uncle, a recognized sculptor and former Bourdelle student in Paris, who gave him a taste for French art.

While in high school, he also discovered photography as an art. As a university student, he traveled to Italy to study art and architecture. Radu’s architecture studies nurtured a discipline that can be easily noticed in his work. He practiced and was also a professor of architecture in Bucharest for several years.

In parallel, he continued to paint, approaching a diversity of genres (still lives, interiors, portraits, landscapes, sketching) while working intensively on refining his style. Traveling and theoretical exercise, combined with teaching architecture theory and history, trained his critical perception and insight.

However, he struggled against the ideological restrictions imposed by the communist regime of Romania. It was very difficult for young artists to survive during such times. In 1981, he headed for Paris and a new life. Paris provided an excellent environment for his art, which flourished during this period. A year later, Radu moved to New York still under the impression of the greatness of Paris. In 1984, he exhibited in Soho the works inspired by la cité lumière.

However, very soon he became submerged in the American reality. Painting with oils and pastels, he was irresistibly attracted by the feeling of spaciousness, grandeur and freedom that a new continent gave him. He painted scenes of the Hudson River Valley, where he had settled down in the little hamlet of Tappan; he painted the greatness of the places he visited in New England and Canada, especially the lakes on which he canoed during the summer; but he was mostly captivated by the infinity of images which could be contained by a city as fascinating as New York.

In the recent years he added to his “collections” new cityscapes of Manhattan, London, Paris, Venice.

A member of the American Institute of Architects, he holds a PhD from the University of Architecture, Ion Mincu. Currently he is pursuing his artistic career working in his studio from Tappan, in Rockland County, New York.