Woman Figure

Jannis Varelas created the bronze sculpture “Woman Figure” on the occasion of his major solo exhibition “Anima I” at the Benaki Museum (2019), co-produced by the Onassis Foundation. In this body of work, the artist returns to images of the body, examining gendered cultural representations of the human form without trapping them in oppositional binaries or stereotypical roles. At the same time, he raises the question of how the self is shaped in an era of constant information and the expanding reach of social media. As he puts it: “On a train from Munich to Vienna, around 2010, I remember watching for a long time a woman arguing with her nine-year-old child. At one point, she shouted, ‘Stop licking your fingers,’ and I remember that, immediately and instinctively, I paraphrased the maternal instruction and reimagined it as, ‘Stop licking my fingers.’ This is the central idea of the sculpture: a paraphrase of the mother’s words, and her form that later emerged and shaped this particular work. In terms of direction, it offers no advice or admonitions, only her two misshapen breasts and her crooked nose.”