Dagmar Varady: Expanded Studio

"Navel to the world"

After the Second World War, the white cube acquired the status of an aesthetic convention. In contrast, Dagmar Varady's studio, impressively presented in the book, conveys the impression of being in a place where art is produced as well as in an "exhibition space". Her works are not to be seen as completed works or pictures, but are "permanently in motion", as the artist emphasises. In this way, a personal (knowledge) order emerges in the studio in the context of art, something like "principles in chaos", whereby controlled chance (serendipity) also comes into play, as can be clearly observed in the structures, folds and gradients in her series of "Brilliant Blue" pictures. With all the breaks, deviations, intuitions, exceptions and ambiguities that appear in her art, Dagmar Varady has embarked on the "path of purposelessness" (Ernst Bloch) - a purposelessness that promotes the processual nature of art, which in turn would not come about without a permanent place of production, the studio. And so motifs meander from picture to picture in an indeterminate production process, enter into dialogue with each other and transform protean-like into ever new variations. 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 play a significant role in determining the artistic attitude and programme.

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