COSMIN MOLDOVAN
Martyrs and Memories
Opening
Wednesday, September 3rd 2025
6 PM – 9 PM
Until
Wednesday October 8th
Estopia Art Gallery
With the finalization of renovation works at our flagship location in Aosta—a new 250 sqm space in the heart of the old town—Estopia Art Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its autumn season in Lugano with Martyrs and Memories, the first solo exhibition in Switzerland of Romanian sculptor Cosmin Moldovan.
With Martyrs and Memories, Moldovan composes a procession of saint-like figures—monumental, motionless, and caught between veneration and enigma. Robed bodies, open hands, eyes lifted or obscured: his sculptures borrow from the visual language of sanctity, yet resist clear interpretation. Their expressions, poised between solemnity and tension, mysticism and quiet theatricality, grimace slightly—not in pain, but as if holding onto something unspeakable.
The exhibition in Lugano follows immediately after Moldovan’s solo presentation at the International Centre of Contemporary Art in Iași (August 7 – September 1, 2025), extending a dialogue across geographies and interpretations.
We look forward to welcoming you to Estopia Lugano for this special presentation.
Cosmin Moldovan (b. 1976, Arad) is a Romanian visual artist based in his hometown. He studied Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, West University of Timișoara, where he received his BA (1999), MA (2006), and PhD in Visual Arts (2010). While rooted in sculpture, his practice also extends to painting and drawing, developing a formally rigorous language concerned with fragmentation, memory, and the evolution of form.
Recent projects include his 2025 solo exhibition at the International Centre of Contemporary Art in Iași, followed by Errors (Visual Arts Center, Bucharest, 2021; Art Museum Arad, 2020) and Fragments of Our Identity (Art Museum Arad; UJ Kriterion Gallery, Miercurea Ciuc, 2015). He was featured in Monstrul, pătratul și hohotul (The Monster, the Square and the Laughter) at MARe / Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest (2024), and his work has been recognized with the Romanian Artists’ Union Youth Award (2006, ex aequo) and the “Ovidiu Maitec” Sculpture Prize at the Meeting Point Biennale, Arad (2009).
Martyrs and Memories presents a new cycle of works that draw on the iconography of sanctity while deliberately unsettling it. Moldovan’s figures evoke the presence of saints, martyrs, or guardians, yet they remain ambiguous—less portraits of devotion than meditations on the endurance of faith and the fragility of memory.
Materially grounded in resin, charred wood, and scavenged artifacts, these works carry the residue of ritual and time. They do not narrate martyrdom; they simply wait. Memory, in Moldovan’s hands, becomes form: not story, but presence—stilled, unsettled, and fragile. These figures are suspended in meaning, poised between faith and silence, belief and its absence. They invite contemplation, not answers.
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