Anima e Oro

The artist Anette Vargas was born 1964 in Hamburg, Germany.

After finishing her studies, the artist lived and worked in Greece, New York, Hamburg and Rome and traveled extensively in Latin America, Europe and North Africa. Vargas speaks eight languages fluently and considers language a way of navigating through time and space. Her main interest has been always the great mythological themes as well as in cultural and historical settings that generate stories and pictures. Using memory and observation, she translates these stories, often retelling them in a personal way, into the picture space. Her painting suggests sounds, smell and metaphysical experience.

Vargas says she always starts her large scale paintings with the human face. The last touch and stroke are always the human face again. Like a blind person she feels the soul’s faces – sensing it as an inner mimic and through gestural language.

The paintings become a stage as in a midsummer night’s dream. Geometry, as a reflection of cosmic law and harmony, is translated into the pictorial space of the canvas. Geometry is a methodical device the painter uses to transcend our limited understanding of the world and its laws.

The artist has a strong fascination for places where people developed special ideas in the past and for magical places of historical importance; Places such as Moravske Krumlov in the Czech Republic where Paracelsus tried to find the secret of producing gold. The cultural context also plays an important role in the creative process and is an on-going source of inspiration for the painter.

Vargas has kept a studio in the small village where she was born in Schleswig Holstein, Germany. She lives there with her family and she almost speaks the language of birds and fishes.