Centaur, 1985

Sofia Vari started out as a painter but soon turned to sculpture. The human figure was her exclusive subject in her early works. Corpulent women, rendered with intense schematization and an absorption with the general elements which compose the figure, worked with powerful curves and a particularly heavily stressed fluidity of the volumes, were the precursors of the abstract compositions that were to follow. In these compositions, her interest is focused on subjects inspired by people or events in Greek mythology, while her style contains a number of influences, mainly from the work of Henry Moore and Jean Arp.

In “Centaur”, as in other works of mythological content, the subject is only the motivation for creating comprehensive compositions, based on curved and full volumes which seem to develop around an invisible nucleus surrounding it. Faultlessly smooth and polished, the volumes are combined and interwoven rhythmically, without angular interventions and interruptions of their alternations and thus form shapes spare and clean.