Dagmar VaradyExpanded Studio

After the Second World War the white cube attained the status of an aesthetic convention. The studio of Dagmar Varady, impressively presented in this book, conveys by contrast the impression of being both a place where art is produced and an “exhibition space.” Accordingly, her works are not to be regarded as finished works or pictures; rather, they are “permanently in motion,” as the artist emphasises. In the studio, she says, a personal order (of knowledge) emerges within the context of art, something like “principles within chaos,” whereby steered chance (serendipity) also comes into play, as can readily be observed in the structures, folds and gradients of her series of “Brilliant Blue” pictures. With all the ruptures, deviations, intuitions, exceptions and ambiguities that occur in her art, Dagmar Varady has set out on the “path of intentionlessness” (Ernst Bloch) – an absence of intention that fosters the processual quality of art, which in turn would not come about without a permanent place of production, the studio. And so motifs meander there from picture to picture in an indeterminate process of production, enter into dialogue with one another and transform themselves protean-like into ever new variants. In this respect Dagmar Varady’s studio is not simply a place of work but, as the artist herself calls it, her “navel to the world” and, as such, a kind of laboratory in which intrinsic processes substantially shape her artistic attitude and programme.

Exhibition:
Galerie Pamme-Vogelsang, Cologne, 30/6 – 26/8/2023