Sophia Vari was born in Greece from a Greek father and a Hungarian mother.
She studied and worked abroad for many years, first in England then mainly in France where at the age of sixteen, she began painting.
As painter and sculpture she is strongly influenced by the origin of the Mediterranean culture.
Living in Paris, the artist is well acquainted with modern trends in sculpture, in particular Cubism and Surrealism.
Her creative talent produced works that are full of sensuality, dynamism and intelligence, also inspired by a wide variety of sources: sculpture from the Mayan, Egyptian, Olmec, and Cycladic traditions and from Greek antiquity to Baroque.
Sophia Vari is a complete sculptor and has a deep knowledge of the traditional art forms and their history. In her sculptures, even in the most abstract, the incisive beauty of the human figure seeps out.
The artist asserts her desire: «To imbue shapes and colour, and even their very geometry, with human qualities, within a spatial context».

At the beginning of her artistic career, Sophia Vari was also an enthusiastic painter, especially during the years in Paris, when she was intensely fascinated by the sensuous shapes of the women in Rubens’ paintings. In fact, the feminine subject frequently reappears both in her graphical and
sculptural works. However, she felt the need for a different expression other than painting and in 1976 stated that, “painting is an illusion, a trompe l'oeil. I want to touch, I want the volume, I want to be able to walk around my work, I want to create into a space, to prove that what I created really does exist. Discovering these things, I began to feel my own existence”.

After several years working with marble and bronze, “suddenly”, she writes “I started to miss colour. So I decided to devote my energies to some kind of assemblages on canvas.
This allowed me to blend the delicacy of painting with design. I no longer created with volume, but with colour, preserving my sculptural awareness of shape”. Colour in any case, definitely plays an attractive role when combined with the harmony of sculpture. The fusion of these two artistic practices allows the artist to transfer colour on different surfaces, adapting them to the various tones.

Sophia Vari is deeply fascinated by Italian art traditions, especially by simple shapes and essential details particularly of Giotto and Piero della Francesca. On the one hand, Vari’s work also takes inspiration from the large, sensual, and often fantastic manierism-style sculptures of Giambologna; on the other hand, Donatello has a crucial influence on her new way of looking at the sources of sculpture – human form and erotic interaction.

Sophia Vari was extremely successful, with important retrospective exhibitions at the Benaki Museum in Athens and at the National Art Gallery in Malaysia.

Her artwork delighted the eyes of many spectators in solo exhibitions held in Granada, Seville and Gerona, in Spain.

In 2007,he had an important exposition in Tenerife and the Contini Gallery of Art in Venice, Italy, held a personal exhibition of her sculptures, watercolours, oils and pastels.

In the summer of 2008 an important cultural event in Monte Carlo was an exhibition with fifteen of Sophia’s monumental sculptures in the gardens of Piazza del Casino. The same year, at the Confucius Temple, on the occasion of the Olympic Games of Beijing, she had a memorable solo show presenting seven bronze sculptures and fifteen oil paintings. Sophia Vari was the first foreign artist to exhibit her work at the Temple.

In 2011 she exposed her monumental sculptures at Paso de la Castellana, Madrid, and at Cartagena de Indias.

Her monumental sculptures are present in many of the most important cities of the world like Paris, Athens, New York, Montreal, Monaco, Miami and Caracas.

Sophia Vari has discovered also the field of jewelry design and successfully working diverse material such as silver, gold, coral,.. According to the artist, “When I was traveling for exhibitions, in my free time I would make small plastic models. One day I saw all of them together in my studio and the idea
of using them as jewelry came to me. I call them “Portable sculptures”. They are in silver, gold and dark wood.

In the exhibition at the Contini Gallery of Art there will be a prestigious display of Sophia Vari’s work: jewelry, sculptures, oils and mixed media paintings.

“What I look for is to take geometry, volume and form , to humanize it in space”.

“Creating is fulfilling and the very reason of life especially in moments of despair; it’s what gives me strength to better express myself”.
 

 

Contini Gallery of Art
San Marco 2288, Calle Larga XXII Marzo
Venice, Italy
Open daily from 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Tel. +39 041 5230357
galleriavenezia2@continiarte.com
www.continiarte.com