Most artists, after spending weeks installing a piece of work on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, would be insulted to have it painted over.

Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi finds it liberating. He will spend the week atop a hydraulic lift, making political drawings in black Magic Marker on the tall white walls of the museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium while visitors look on. The project began April 19.

Mr. Perjovschi, trained in painting under a communist regime so strict it prohibited the study of artists newer than Picasso, said he is wary of being tied down, artistically or otherwise. “It gives me freedom to redraw,” he said of the temporary nature of his irreverent cartoons, which range from gun-shaped human bodies to a figure with sweat stains labeled “global warming.” “I can travel with my own drawings — that’s very nice,” he said.

Mr. Perjovschi’s work, part of MoMA’s ongoing Projects series, officially opens next Wednesday. Until then, he will continue to draw directly on the atrium’s walls for several hours a day while museumgoers watch, transforming the work from drawing to performance. When the exhibit — Mr. Perjovschi’s first solo exhibition in America — closes August 27, the walls will be returned to white.

The curator of the department of photography at MoMA, Roxana Marcoci, said Mr. Perjovschi was selected for the Projects series, intended for developing artists, in part because his work hasn’t received much exposure in America.

“It’s very interesting how the museum wall functions as an artist’s sketchbook and a think pad,” Ms. Marcoci said. Visitors, she added, “love it because it’s interactive. … The public wants to be part of the experience of art.”

Since 1991, Mr. Perjovschi has drawn political cartoons for 22 magazine, Romania’s first independent post-communist publication, which he described as “ugly” and “printed on bad paper — perfect for my drawings.” His cartoons have since migrated onto museum walls and art fairs all over Europe, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Moscow Biennale.

Taking inspiration from newspapers including the Guardian and Le Monde, as well as CNN and a smattering of Web logs, he always carries a sketchbook with him and “thinks in drawing format,” jotting down sketches relating to political events. This week, he said, his thoughts turned to the killings at Virginia Tech, prompting him to adorn MoMA’s walls with a vestwearing, scowling stick figure in the likeness of the shooter. The gun in its hands is projected onto multiple television screens. The drawing is not really about the shooter, Mr. Perjovschi said, but about “the media who have to talk about him, and the debate over whether to show it or not.”

According to an independent contemporary art curator, Michael Walls, Mr. Perjovschi’s work may be off-putting to some critics, who may find it “edgier” than MoMA’s usual exhibits. Although he hasn’t yet seen the work, he said, “I would applaud the museum for doing something with that kind of vitality.”

Mr. Perjovschi said he knows not everyone is a fan of his drawings. “Cartoons are considered low art,” he said. “But if you stay a little bit and you enter these drawings, they’re pretty honest.”

Museumgoers watching Mr. Perjovschi work yesterday seemed to agree. “They’re phenomenal,” Erica Scheinblum, a clothing designer who lives in Brooklyn, said of the drawings. “The points he’s making, we need to see and hear in our culture.”

“It’s a political statement with humor,” her mother-in-law, Manhattanite Lillian Scheinblum, said. While he waits for other New Yorkers to weigh in, Mr. Perjovschi happily basks in the power of free speech.

“When you’re a kid, they tell you not to draw on the walls,” he said. “Now, here I am at MoMA.”