Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu is the most valuable female painter that Moldova has had to date. She was born on October 28, 1920, in Chișinău. The work of the late artist stands out not only for its expressive means, which critics have deemed unconventional and innovative, but also for its profound poetic quality. According to the commentary of S. Boberanga, Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu’s painting is a symbiosis of “poetic realism” and “original spirit.” In the opinion of critic Vladimir Bulat, the style chosen by the painter could be “read,” during the Soviet regime, as a “sublimated subversion,” a risk that Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu willingly embraced.
Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu laid the foundations of the higher school of fine arts in Chișinău, alongside master Mihai Grecu. She belongs to that generation of Bessarabian plastic artists who were formed in the cultural atmosphere of interwar Romania: in 1940, she was a student of Auguste Baillayre at the School of Arts in Chișinău, and during the war years, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Iași, in the studio of Professor Jean L. Cosmovici and his assistant, the future famous Romanian painter, Corneliu Baba. “Sculpture and artistic modeling” were taught to her by Ion Irimescu, an artist who, at that time, was on the rise and also became a university professor in the old capital of Moldova.
Her talent, aesthetic sincerity, stylistic refinement, and bold color palette made her the most important painter in Chișinău, being appreciated by the most significant art critics of the time, despite her nonconformity to the cultural and ideological demands of the era. Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu is considered a genius of Bessarabian painting, leaving behind an invaluable heritage filled with spiritual significance for the Romanian cultural space.

Visual artist Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu passed away on November 1, just four days after celebrating her 101st birthday, and she is buried at the Central Cemetery in Chișinău.