Paloma Varga Weisz

Galeria Pedro Cera is proud to present the first exhibition of German artist Paloma Varga Weisz at the gallery and in Portugal. The exhibition brings together a selection of sculptures and drawings from recent years. Although, like much of the work of Varga Weisz, the exhibition escapes first-hand classification, our path through its multiple narratives echoes motives of memory, history and identity. Detached from categories such as time and place, the works of Varga Weisz, rather shape a world of their own. It is a world right on the edge of dream and reality, history and fiction, memory and imagination (…).

Her training in woodcarving has in many ways determined the path of Varga Weisz as an artist. Regardless of her later studies at the art academy, she has remained faithful to the material and namely to the traditional methods of its treatment. The hard, yet warm surface of wood, finds its resemblance with the human body, which occupies a central position in the artist’s work. Such a resemblance of course can suggest to an act of violence, embodied by the gesture of cutting away, but can also, be perceived as a metaphorical act of liberating the unconscious, unveiling the forgotten, the supressed and the imaginary, which has been concealed, or on the contrary surfaced by the mind.

The tendency to contextualize the work of Varga Weisz within Freudian dream theory is at hand, as much as it is to link her practice to subjects of mysticism, religion or traditional iconography. At closer encounter however, the uncanny quality and stillness embodied by her sculptures and the revised temporality conveyed by the exhibition as such, suggests of another reading. A reading, which is in fact much more personal and in its essence touches up on issues, which are relentlessly human and in this sense, also universal.