Roman Tolici

Roman Tolici (b. 1974, Ghetlova, Orhei district, Republic of Moldova) moved to Bucharest in 1990 after receiving a scholarship from the Romanian state to study at the Nicolae Tonitza Art High School. He graduated in graphic art from the National University of Arts in Bucharest in 1998. At the end of the 1990s he experimented in equal measure with literature, illustration, animation, comics and photography, before establishing himself as a painter through solo and group exhibitions from the 2000s onward.

Tolici is considered a representative figure of Romania's 2000s generation of artists. His early solo exhibitions were held at Bucharest galleries such as deINTERESE, Galeria Posibilă and H'art Gallery, and his institutional presence grew with the 2008 solo shows It Could Happen Tomorrow at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest and Park at the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu. In 2014 the National Art Museum of Moldova in Chișinău presented his solo exhibition Ceremonies, and in 2016 he showed Dark Matter at Triumph Gallery in Moscow. His work has been exhibited internationally in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and the United States, including the group exhibition Painting (RO)mania at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt in 2009. He is represented by Mobius Gallery in Bucharest.

His painting is associated with a photographic realism infused with poetry and a surreal sense of everyday existence: mundane subjects, documented photographically and processed pictorially, become reflections on time, memory and general human questions and anxieties. Recent bodies of work extend this approach into explicitly social territory. Pursuit of Happiness (Constanța Art Museum, 2023) positioned the artist as an observer of capitalist reality and its paradoxes; the Realpolitik series (Mobius Gallery, 2023) comprised ink works on magazine prints alongside the video installation Negative Flags; and New Hope gathered paintings created over roughly five years, reflecting on the transformations that have redefined the contemporary world and on the persistence of hope.

Tolici lives and works in Bucharest. Between 2024 and 2026 the itinerant exhibition New Hope travelled through Brașov, Timișoara, Bucharest, Sibiu and Tulcea before concluding at the National Art Museum of Moldova in Chișinău in 2026.