Golgota | Filippo Cigni, Matteo Gobbo and Giampaolo Parrilla

From 31 October to 15 November 2026, the Church of San Valentino della Grada in Bologna hosts Golgota, a contemporary art exhibition by Filippo Cigni, Matteo Gobbo and Giampaolo Parrilla, curated by Marta Trombini, developed from a shared research project on the theme of the Crucifixion and on the relationship between contemporary art and places of worship.

Starting from Annibale Carracci’s Crucifixion with Saints, housed in the nearby Church of Santa Maria della Carità, the artists reflect on Golgotha as both a physical and symbolic place: not only the setting of the crucifixion, but also a space where death and life, power and renunciation, pain and love come into relation.

The exhibition engages with one of the foundational images of Western culture in order to question the present, which is constantly marked by images of death and suffering. In this context, the Crucifixion becomes an opportunity to rethink our relationship with mortality and to recover a dimension of balance, awareness and connection.

The works enter the church space as new layers of meaning, establishing a dialogue with its architecture, history and the community that inhabits it. Golgota thus brings contemporary artistic languages into dialogue with religious tradition, based on the idea that art can still serve as a tool for storytelling and reflection.