»Elisabeth Vary«

Elizabeth Vary is born in Cologne, 1940. She lives and works in Cologne and in the French town of Corberon. Already in 1994 she participated in the group show "The last dream of Herr Schleiermacher" at Galerie Nordenhake. 1998-99 a large solo exhibition was showed at Galerie am Fishmarkt, Erfurt; Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, and at Von-der-Heydt Museum in Wuppertal. Since 1992 Elizabeth Vary is a Professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, in Cologne.

I her latest show at Galerie Nordenhake it becomes obvious that Elizabeth Vary's paintings consist of several parts. She manifests herself in a form of painting liberated from all superfluous aspects, except for the presence of colour, and the chain of events by which the colour has come to existence. Her art demands a certain activity on behalf of the viewer. Her paintings cannot be perceived form just one angle, since they insist that the viewer move around them, and approach them from several directions.

Vary's paintings revolve around relations in the space, as well as relations between painting and viewer, and the different sufaces of the paintings themselves. Her untitled pieces from 1999-2000 urges us to enter into a personal dialogue, and lead the process to its natural conclusion in an aesthetic act - reminding of the traditional dictum of the actor: "seeing is doing."