Monumental art – “The Shot Pillars”, seven bronze silhouettes dedicated to the revolutionaries from Cluj

“The Shot Pillars”, a monument that includes seven bronze “silhouettes” more than 3 meters high, bearing at least a symbolic trace of the bullets that killed lives in December 1989 in Cluj-Napoca, is the work of artist Liviu Mocan.

During the 1989 Revolution, 26 people died in Cluj-Napoca, 13 of them in Union Square. Another 57 were injured, 28 of them here.

The ensemble was placed at the intersection of Unirii Square and Napoca Street, in front of Rhedey Palace, directly on the ground in 2003.

“If all the ‘pillars’ have closed bullet wounds, one of them has an open wound and, through it, you can see the sky,” says the sculptor.

Liviu Mocan was born in 1955 in the village of Cara, from where his family moved to Cluj after the communist regime confiscated their material goods. Here, Liviu Mocan graduated from the School of Art, the Art High School, the Academy of Art (now the University of Art and Design Cluj Napoca), then went on to postgraduate studies at Anderson University and Mississippi College in the United States. He has undertaken study trips to important centers of universal sculpture. He has shown in solo and group exhibitions on all continents and has created public works in four of them. He has works in public and private collections in Romania, Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom, United States of America, Norway, New Zealand, Hungary, Austria, Greece, Australia, Hungary, Austria, Greece, Australia.

His other monumental sculptures in public spaces include “The Seed” (National Art Museum Cluj-Napoca), “The Mountain and Its Heart” (Jordan River, Glen Eyrie Castle, Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs, USA), ‘Illseed’ (North Shore Hospital Auckland, New Zealand), “Egyptian Poet” (NaDonal Library of Alexandria, Egypt), “Forcing Community” (University for Technology, Trondheim, Norway). He lives and works in Cluj-Napoca.