Varga Weisz's figures of various sizes are scattered around the chapel in the form of delicate watercolours or sculptures made of raw wood, silver or gold plated. They are strange creatures, sometimes fairy tale-like, perhaps a little uncanny, often likeable. Despite their alienation, which can immediately fascinate the beholder, Varga Weisz's figures radiate a narrative, touching harmony, especially in their apparent interaction.
The artist's watercolors, works from the 1990s to the present day, show portrait-like depictions that remain ambiguous in their physiognomy and reveal the artist's multilayered view of the world. They find their expression in the delicate brushstrokes and in the light that these pictures seem to release.
Light also becomes the defining element in Heinz Ackermans's most recent sculptures, with an almost material force. They are large sculptures of figures, even if they are not life-size. They appear to us, and this is already characteristic of Ackermans's earlier works, as a careful and expressive accumulation of material. Here it is resin, coloured with pigment, which, despite its massiveness, lets light through and releases it from within.
Ackermans's pictures are wall objects; here he applies foam, resin, pigment and wool to the picture support before framing it in iron. This bold use of materials sometimes transforms the figurative character of the subjects into abstract schemes.
What seems fairy tale-like in Varga Weisz's work may also be based on personal mythologies: her figures are not of this world, yet they are attractive because they are apt to remind us of our own visual and emotional experiences. Ackermans refers explicitly to myths, for example with the depiction of an Icarus, but remains subtle enough through his rough, suggestive execution of surfaces and forms to open up the beholder's own realms of experience.
Paloma Varga Weisz was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1966. After training as a wood sculptor, she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Tony Cragg and Gerhard Merz. Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, most recently at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England (2020), the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, the Netherlands (2019), the Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (both 2015). The artist lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Heinz Ackermans was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, in 1949. The trained sculptor interrupted his artistic career for around two decades in the mid-1980s, during which time he built up a highly regarded art collection of works by his contemporaries. The artist's works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. Ackermans lives and works in London and Mallorca.
