Wild Leute 3

Wilde Leute 3 is a glass sculpture belonging to a group of five unique pieces. The title refers to Paloma Varga Weisz’s ongoing series of the same name (begun around 1998 and loosely translating as Wild People). The series is inspired by the description of the “Wild People”, who were considered a symbol of the primitive state of man, without social constraints and in harmony with nature, in the Middle Ages. In the art of the 14th century, the “Wild People” were often depicted without hair on face, hands and feet, while the rest of the body was covered with shaggy fur. Varga Weisz’s contemporary take on the theme has resulted in works depicting strange-looking and androgynous creatures with animal ears, inspired by medieval folk tales, and regarded as a symbol for the primordial state of humans.

The works extend the artist’s personal iconography, evolved over the course of her career, resting at the intersection of the natural world, human desire, myth, surrealism, and modernism. Akin to their earlier counterparts – in terracotta and wood – the glass figures emerge as fantastical, hybridized beings redolent of folk tales or childhood imagination, in varying attitudes of meditative contemplation. When Varga Weisz showed the Wilde Leute glass sculptures at Sadie Coles HQ in London (Paloma Varga Weisz. Glass, 12 July - 19 August 2023) the press release stated:

Varga Weisz’s new sculptures represent the first time she has worked with glass, signalling a significant new stage in her sustained exploration of sculpture as a medium and traditional modes of craftsmanship. Developed over the past year, the body of work emerged from Varga Weisz’s experience of glass during a visit to Murano, following which she began a collaboration with glassmakers in South Tirol to explore the unique potential to express the transitory elements of light and colour inherent to the medium.

The sculptures, as pointed out by Sadie Coles HQ, are not pre-conceived but instead shaped intuitively. Starting life as clay maquettes, their androgynous forms reveal subtly articulated expressions offset by gestural bodily contours, as though cloaked in smooth fur-like outer skins.

Originally arranged into small groupings, the series draw reference to early and medieval Renaissance interpretations of familial intimacy and harmonious communing with nature. Yet, Varga Weisz conveys her figures with abstract fluidity blurring the preconceived boundaries of gender; the varying arrangements of elder and childlike characters envisioning families with manifold and diverse interrelationships of primordial intimacy freed of convention.

From the beginning of her practice, Varga Weisz has sought to distance herself from the idea of entrenched identities and rigid role models. Sadie Coles HQ, once again, touched upon this:

Cast in luminous, coloured glasses – of amber, blue, greens, pink, and lilac – the families and their various characters are transposed as tender apparitions, their presence animated by light refracted from within the medium. These anthropomorphic figures evoke shifting unworldly identities unmoored from a specific time or locus, investing their characters with individual psychoanalytical auras; to which Varga Weisz relates Sigmund Freud’s aesthetic view of the uncanny, an emotive response prompted by the strangeness or mutability in the everyday.

Provenance

Sadie Coles HQ, London, Paloma Varga Weiss. Glass, 12 July – 19 August 2023.

Firestorm (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation