NYAB Event - Sophia Vari “IN RELIEF”

Sophia Vari “IN RELIEF”

Nohra Haime Gallery

This event has ended.

SOPHIA VARI’s newest series of works, IN RELIEF. The gallery will be celebrating Vari’s 100th international one-person exhibition.

IN RELIEF is a new challenge in Vari’s pursuit of texture, matter, shapes and spatial analysis. The idea of the relief has interested her since her first contemplations of the Acropolis’ pediments and friezes. This attraction began as a child, an instinctive proclivity towards Ancient Greece and its art and history, which also brought an interest in the plastic possibilities of marble.

The material chosen for these reliefs, epoxy, grants the artist a similar appearance to marble, while its physical characteristics provide a lightness and malleability full of possibilities. In MESSAGE DE L’INVISIBLE (2014), this flexibility allows Vari to treat the material as if it were marble and use it in the contours and indentations of the pieces, which open their way into the composition.

Vari combines her conceptual engagement with both painting and sculpture in these works, playing with the surface’s dimensions and allowing a different approach to the development of shapes in space. This kind of sculpting technique eliminates the complete flatness of painting and the individuality of sculpture, and instead borrows attributes from both, as we see in LES SONGES (2015).

Intricate forms interact with themselves, the space and the viewer in Vari’s work. L’ETENDUE DU SILENCE (2014) is a good example of the playfulness and liveliness she achieves using compositions in which shapes are pushed into the realm of dimensional space. The chosen color, white, is related to her fixation with marble, but its use is also due to the color’s composing ability through light and shadow. The shadows come deeper and stronger than with any other color, which requires shapes to be built cleanly and without imperfections because, in Vari’s words, “white forgives nothing.”

In these reliefs, we witness Vari’s emblematic maneuver of revealing each piece by itself in a subtle and clever manner. Her works are elegant, her shapes full of a distinct autonomous life. Just as in the Parthenon and the Temple of Athena Nike, they seem to be in a constant permutation with a sense of weightlessness and suspension, yet resolving space and structure with an imposing bearing.

Born in Athens in 1940, Sophia Vari attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1958. She has 100 one-person exhibitions. Worldwide museum exhibitions include the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; the Palazzo Bricherassio, Torino; The Ludwig Museum, Kombletz; the Pera Museum, Istanbul; and more recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Andros. Outdoor solo exhibitions of Vari’s monumental sculptures have taken place in cities such as Paris, Rome, Montecarlo, Baden-Baden, Geneva, Pietrasanta, Athens, Madrid and Cartagena de Indias, among others. Sophia Vari currently lives and works in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Media

• Sculpture

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