Dagmar Varady Expanded Studio

After World War II, the white cube acquired the status of an aesthetic convention. Dagmar Varady’ s studio, impressively presented in the book, though seems to be a place where art is produced and also an “ exhibition space” . Rather than being viewed as completed works or paintings, her works are “ permanently in motion” , as the artist emphasizes. Thus, in the studio, a personal (knowledge) order emerges in the context of art, something along the lines of “ principles in chaos” , whereby guided chance (serendipity) also comes into play, which is quite evident in the structures, folds, and progressions in her series of “ Brilliant-Blue” paintings. With all the breaks, deviations, intuitions, exceptions, and ambiguities that occur in her art, Dagmar Varady has set out on the “ path of unintentionality” (Ernst Bloch) – an unintentionality that promotes the processuality of art, but which in turn would not come about without a steady place of production, the studio. There, motifs meander from picture to picture in an indeterminate production process, enter into dialogue with one another, and undergo a protean transformation into ever new variants. As such, Dagmar Varady’ s studio is not simply a place of work but, in the artist’ s own words, her “ navel to the world” and, as such, a kind of laboratory in which intrinsic processes play a significant role in determining artistic attitudes and objectives.

Paolo Bianchi, b. 1960, is a university lecturer, cultural journalist and guest editor for the magazine Kunstforum International in Cologne and freelance curator. Since 2004 lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts, including in the Master Art Education. 2012 recipient of the Swiss Federal Art Award in the category of art education. Main areas of work: Art Education, Curating, Life Art Works, Crossovers in the Arts, Art in the City, Contemporary Art Practice, and Theories of Contemporary Art. He wrote several times on the work of Dagmar Varady. Dagmar Varady has buttressed a considerable and luminous career as a visual artist by magnifying her studio practice with forays into digital technology, biology, science fiction and environmental studies. By translating the intricate systems in play within these disciplines, she exposes the rich emotional potential of objective inquiries. Throughout, her work has remained assertively visual. The links between the rational and subjective reflection are made deliriously clear in her nuanced use of traditional, formal tools of color, light, composition, material, texture and space.