ART-PRESENTATION: Paloma Varga Weisz-Wundergestalt

Paloma Varga Weisz’s wood-carved sculptures, paintings, drawings and watercolors explore themes of memory, mortality, transformation, metamorphosis, the uncanny and the tragicomic. Art-historical and literary resonances pervade her work – German folklore, Christian iconography, and Modernist sculpture. Varga Weisz subsumes these influences into a distinctive personal style, characterized both by playful surrealism and emotional candor.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Classically trained in Bavaria, Varga Weisz was taught traditional techniques of woodcarving, modelling and casting before attending art school in Düsseldorf in the 1990s. Her handmade woodcarvings are heavily textured and tactile, and frequently probe traditional approaches towards display. Her figures, both sculptural and illustrated, are often laden with personal and collective motifs, where oddities of form are common fare: anthropomorphic figures, hybrid forms, or figures verging on the grotesque. New sculptures and drawings by Paloma Varga Weisz are on presentation at her solo exhibition “Wundergestalt” at Gladstone Gallery in New York. For this exhibition, Varga Weisz creates fantastical animal-human hybrids that emerge from an imaginative terrain wherein the miraculous shapes of the title shed light on both the chimerical and the humane. Whether left in their original wooden state or surfaced with metallic leafing or polychrome, the figures emerge from this place of interior wonder through Varga Weisz’s acuity for both craft and fine art traditions. Perhaps a collection of strange figures held in the wunderkammer (a place where a collection of curiosities and rarities is exhibited) of the mind, each sculpture possesses both a distinct bearing and semblance of relationships to each other. One is strongly tempted to associate Varga Weisz’s work in sculpture with a certain vein in the oeuvre of Thomas Schütte. There are the same dark moods, the same realistic yet deformed bodies. Here too, we find human beings who look like victims of some trauma. But Schütte’s figures have afflicted or bewildered or terrible expressions, and to look at them we must grapple with repulsion; their faces show the suffering they have undergone. Varga Weisz’s faces are just the opposite. Though dealing with equally traumatic situations, they express not desperation but a mild serenity, a sort of peace. This disorients viewers, then bewitches them. Rather than repulsion, one feels fascination and calm.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, New York, Duration: 12/1-16/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gladstonegallery.com