Sophia Vari sculpture comes to Mayfair
Sophia Vari, Trouble Essentiel, 1993, bronze, 140 x 168 x 120 cm. Photography Barney Hindle.
Presented by Waddington Custot, a bronze monochromatic sculpture by contemporary artist Sophia Vari, titled Trouble Essentiel, has been installed on the corner of New Bond St.
Sophia Vari was born in Athens, Greece in 1940 and is a visual artist known for her investigations into form and balance, working across sculpture, collage, oil and watercolour. In 1958, she graduated from the École des Beaux Arts, in Paris and, in the decades following, her work has been celebrated with almost 100 solo exhibitions to date over the course of her career. Vari has had several museum exhibitions including: Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; The Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany; and more recently, Pera Museum, Istanbul.
Vari’s work is included in international public collections worldwide and her monumental sculptures have been shown in public locations around the world. For each installation, she pays special attention to the way that her works are integrated with the cities in which they are exhibited. Vari is particularly concerned with the way in which the tactile quality of the patina surfaces can encourage a connection with her viewers, while the majestic scale of her public sculptures creates a strong visual impact.
Vari’s work has evolved through several stages over her decades of sculpture making. While her early work from the 1960s onwards was mostly figurative, in the 1980s, Vari began to employ rounded abstract forms that suggested the human body. Eventually she began incorporating planar and constructed forms into her work, and by the mid-1990s Vari had begun to apply colour to the surfaces of her dynamic sculptures. This use of colour contributes to the movement of Vari’s pieces, and her sculptural works, created both on a monumental scale and as table pieces, appear to move autonomously as the viewer walks around them. Her work across all media shares a certain playfulness and liveliness, with compositions in collage, watercolour and paint pushing into the realm of dimensional space.
