Born in 1931 in Cetatea-Alba, a Romanian town in Bessarabia that was part of the Soviet Union at the time, Nicolai Dragos entered his country's art scene at a young age in Bucharest. Coming from a well-established and wealthy family in his region, Dragos studied the piano as a child, which initially served to channel his primary artistic interests into music.
At the end of the 1940s, already interested in studying painting, he met Rudolf Schweitzer-Cumpana (1886-1975) and Corneliu Baba (1906-1997), two of his country's most important painters. There he began experimenting with materials and creating his first pieces, echoing his own childhood and its ludic aspects. He also began to create portraits with strong plays of light and shadow, influenced by Baba.
During this period, he also became interested in expressionism, and in 1952 he made a trip to Brussels that would become seminal in his artistic career. He spent two months studying in the Belgian capital and there he met the work of the protagonists of the CoBrA group, who had just held their last exhibition in Liège, also in Belgium. The group—formed by artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam—offered new aesthetic references for Dragos, with semi-figurative and gestural practices and, ultimately, a whole relationship with the method and making of the painting that Dragos identified with and preserved in later decades.
From 1954, when he held his first solo show in Bucharest, Dragos began to exhibit in various solo and group shows in institutions and galleries in cities such as Sofia, Paris, Brussels, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Le Havre, Istanbul and Warsaw, among others. In 1976, Dragos emigrated to Brazil with his wife, and in the following years his work circulated in various exhibitions, but already at a time when his work as a pathologist was taking up more of his routine and establishing him as a big name in this field, leaving his artistic productions in the background—although they never ceased.
His work is in the collections of Brazilian museums and institutions such as the Museum of Brazilian Art, at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, in São Paulo; the Museu de Arte de Brasília – MAB; the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campinas José Pancetti – MACC; the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Paraná – MAC, in Curitiba; the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo – MAM-SP; the Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina – MASC, in Florianópolis; the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; the Centro Universitário Maria Antônia of the Universidade de São Paulo – USP, and the Centro Histórico of the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, in São Paulo.