Natalia Dumitresco, born in Bucharest, Romania in 1915, was a French/Romanian abstract painter associated with the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a Paris group that promoted geometric abstract art during the post-World War II period. Other abstract expressionist painters associated with the group include Serge Poliakoff and Alexandre Istrati, Dumitresco's husband. 

Dumitresco studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest from 1934 to 1939, the same year she married Alexandre Istrati. From 1940 to 1947, she worked and exhibited in Romania. In 1946, she had her own dedicated exhibition at Sala Dalles in Bucharest.

Because of a French grant in 1947, Dumitresco and Istrati moved to Paris. They soon befriended the legendary sculptor Constantin Brancusi, another displaced Romanian. At his request, the couple moved into a studio next door to his at 11 Impasse Ronsin in the XVth arrondisement of Paris. They worked for Brancusi for nine years until his death in 1957. Istrati and Dumitresco were named the legal executors of his will. Together, the two reorganized the “Studio Brancusi”, a wing in the illustrous Pompidou Center in Paris, dedicated in 1977. Dumitresco and Istrati moved in 1958 from l’Impasse Ronsin to 18 Rue Sauvageot, where they built their studios on a property left to them by Brancusi. They both became naturalized French citizens in 1965.

Dumitresco’s style of painting followed the movement of the post-war trends that evolved in the School of Paris circle, and she was greatly influenced by the art of Wassily Kandinsky. Her austere and rigorous style of painting relied on modulations of geometric frameworks – squares, grids, stripes, meshes, circles, rectangles, diamonds – like a kaleidoscope of infinite variations on emptiness and light, in which graphic style and colors are indissociable. Using armatures and quadrangular cells that structure the space into labyrinths, optical mazes, and bustling molecules, the artist seeks to capture rhythm and pace through the use of serial repetition. 

Beginning in 1952, Dumitresco won many prestigious awards, including one from the group Espace in 1952, the Kandinsky Award in 1955, the Prix des Amateurs et Collectionneurs d’Art in 1957, and the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh in 1959. This early period in the 1950s is the finest of Dumitresco’s and will further be explored by historians and collectors in the future as this school of painting is more critically reviewed.