Paloma Varga Weisz

The creatures modelled in clay are neither human nor animal, their delicately formed faces give way to shapeless bodies that spread out in irregular curves like a sponge on a blackboard. Tantalisingly poised on the brink of complete dissolution, Paloma Varga Weisz’s Wilde Leute (Wild People) evoke the golem-like process of creation, from which the characteristic liveliness of expression was the first thing to emerge. While the rest of the body still bears the blurred contours of the hands that formed it, the hybrid creatures stand on the threshold of completion and serve as a bodily building for a minimal sense of rootedness. Forms of all kinds are discussed, in terms of both physical and social structure. Yet who here is actually shaping whom?

The three figures, originally presented as a ceramic ensemble in Varga Weisz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Bochynek in Düsseldorf in 1998, have been translated into bronze for this year’s Jahresgaben. They treat the body as a venue for fantastical ideas: the three-part normative construction of father-mother-child gives way to a genderless team sporting oversized ears and amorphously shaped bodies. In the space between infinity and finitude, between coarseness and tenderness, between autonomy and limitation, Varga Weisz’s family sketch rehearses a scene of parental care. But just as the mythological figure of Pandora embodies the concept of a history of ideas, the transgressive desire for a possible enhanced existence hangs like a veil before the proscenium of familial harmony. The gestural struggle between awakening and decay appears like a frozen snapshot of a scene from paradise: like Pandora, moulded out of clay by Hephaestus, we find ourselves wondering what lies bubbling beneath this mercilessly friendly facade.

– Ruth Magers