Ariel Moscovici (born 1956, Bucharest, Romania) is a sculptor born in Romania and based in France. His drawings and sculptures have appeared in France at Salons de Mai, Grands et Jeunes d'aujourd'hui, Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, 33rd Salon de la Jeune Sculpture, 3Oth Salon de Montrouge, and others. Internationally, his work has been the subject of exhibits and installations in Andorra, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Moscovici works have been awarded first prize at the Biennale Internationale de Sculpture Contemporaine, Collioure and purchase awards from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan. Moscovici's public art work Between Sky and Earth, was installed at Taipei 101 in 2003.
 Born in Bucharest, Romania, Moscovici graduated in 1979 from L'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Paris. He now lives in the south of France. He is married to French sculptor Sylvie Rivillon.
 Moscovici, normally reluctant to discuss art in words, has in recent years offered a few written comments for exhibit programs. His remarks include the following observations.
 In my work I use mostly what may be called classical materials (stone, wood, clay, bronze, metal. etc.) because these are almost abstract and amorphous. Their identity resides mainly in their structure (except for metal). This allows me to model them the way I want while respecting their character.

I want to realize what I call "inhabited forms"--forms that contain energy, as if they could breathe and live by themselves. This is a personal attitude of mine, both classical and modern, as I don't wish to be part of any official fashion or artistic movement.

My subjects have no clear borders. They are connected to each other. My basic themes: nature; landscapes that accommodate and oppose human creation; an architecture of the "spirit"; skeletons and enveloping skin; the evocation of a feeling or a sound or a privileged location; landscapes with flat areas and mountains, rough or modelled, with erosion that is natural or artificial, accomplished by nature or man.

I am lately working on a series of variations on a theme. In Between Three Points [2000] I explored the idea of reading a sculpture in time, as in a  work of music. The work is built from three pieces that... tell the story of the creation of a form in three chapters: (1) the beginning, birth, or underground level, (2) the initiation, or earth ground level, and (3) the rebirth or result tending toward the sky. The form is not completely free to grow as it will, but is constrained and guided by internal tectonic pressures and external atmospheric pressures. The sculpture can be read in two directions at the same time: horizontally between the three parts and vertically between the ground and the sky....

In Between Earth and Sky [2002] the idea is the same but expressed more in the vertical direction. We have axels between two points, places where passage can take place. The axels stand as almost human figures between the matter and spirit, between the underground (hell) and the sky....

The surface of my forms is worked in the same way: smooth areas in opposition to rough ones and simple, almost geometrical, forms facing multifaceted, chaotic accumulations of shapes. Simplicity strikes me as dangerous. It's wrong to try to understand things by eliminating the details instead of understanding the whole in its complexity. I think the details create the whole.
 Moscovici's images, though modern, may be described as postmodernist in the sense that they are more archetypal than abstract. Raymond Crampagne describes their effect in a publication by the Chateau le Puget Art Gallery:
 The works are not a reflection of geometrical forms in a timeless space. They have a temporal dimension relating not to history or mythology but to a world that existed before both; even so, this world forms the essence of both history and myth. This is a world constantly engaged in struggle. The protagonists in the conflict, humanity and nature, operate in a world of opposites: smooth and rough, gloss and matte, geometrical and irregular, concave and convex, straight and curved, round and square, polished and rough, full and empty, imprint and excrescence, horizontal and vertical, mass and surface.  For Moscovici this conjunction of opposites is characteristic of our species' relationship with nature. Though we are ourselves part of nature, we exert our will over matter and impose our own vision, eventually transforming nature to reflect our innermost being.

Like Rimbaud seeking to write the silences, seize the inexpressible, and freeze whirlwinds, Moscovici seeks to translate into images the fundamental rhythms of existence and the mysteries of nature.... 

Moscovici displays a profound humanism whose expression is anything but extravagant. The means are simple. The eye and the spirit are called inward. ... Here one is facing an uninhabited habitat, a dwelling lacking practical purpose. Only the eye of the beholder will enter and find refuge and, in solitude, dream of habitation.

(Translation: Robert Drew, Jacques Carrio, Alton Thompson)
 One-Artist Shows
 1985
 Maison de la Culture, Courbevoie, France
 1986
 1987
 1989
 1990
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 Group Exhibits
 1985
 1987
 1988
 1990
 1992
 1993
 1994
 1995
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 1997
 1998
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 2000
"20 sculptors", Les Punxes Gallery, Barcelona, Spain
 2001
 2002
 2003
 2004
 2005
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 Monumental Open-Air Sculptures
 1987 - Sculpture (1%), Les Aunettes, Évry III, Versailles, Paris, France
 1988 - Monumental Sculptures Park, Sculpture Symposium, Gueugnon, France
 1990 - UCCOAR, Samary Park, Sculpture International Symposium
 1991 - Lavelanet museum, Sculpture Symposium
 1993 - International Sculpture Symposia, Carcassonne and Auxerre, France
 1994 - Taichung Fine Arts Museum, Taichung, Taiwan
 1997 - 1998 Andorra Sculpture Park, Escaldes, Andorra
 1999 - Hualien Cultural Center Symposium. Hualien, Taiwan
 2002
 2004 - Fountain for the City of Chalabre, France
 2006 -Mosan Symposium, Korea
 2007 - Tudela de Duero symposium, Spain
 Collections