RELICVAR is a contemporary art gallery founded in 2019 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. As a space run by artists, Relicvar Gallery relies on enthusiasm, voluntary involvement, and passion, with its coordinators relying on people around them, friends, and artists, who want to do something to make art accessible to its audience, in the face of a desolate lack of spaces dedicated to contemporary creation.

Without relying on a consistent “portfolio of artists”, the gallery works with friends and young collaborators in search of content and forms of expression that correspond to a “principle of inner necessity”, beyond the theories and desires of the time, but which are and remain valid now and anytime.

At the same time, the creations of senior figures in contemporary art, present in the gallery’s program, enter into dialogue with the art of young artists, legitimizing in a way the beginning of new artistic careers. We aim to reposition, in a new, contemporary context, artists who have marked the recent past of Romanian art, delving into the intimacy of their creation and revealing it to a new young audience from new perspectives.

The gallery’s projects thus create a bridge between generations, showing that there is no “outdated” art, only poorly contextualized/received art.

Without making “originality” an idol or “new and interesting” an absolute criterion, we promote sincere art and artists consistent with their own way of thinking about the artistic act.