Blue Room

Each head carries its own set of marks, made visible through touch: fingerprints, ridges, and unglazed surfaces that preserve the immediacy of the making. They don’t try to be perfect. Instead, they feel close, not just to the artist, but to the moment they were made. “Same, same, but different”, as Paloma puts it.

The sixth sculpture in the series stands apart. It breaks the rhythm, as this character has distinctively different facial features. While the first five works feel emotionally porous, this figure seems fully present, unyielding, and composed. It doesn’t belong to the same emotional loop as the others, and that’s precisely the point. Paloma describes it as a “disturbing element” in the sequence – not disturbing in appearance, but in its difference. A kind of interruption.

She created it while reflecting on her first time exhibiting in Asia – a personal invitation toward a culture she does not yet know. As with many of her sculptures, there’s a sense that these figures have arrived from another time – ancient, maybe sacred, but also unmistakably contemporary. They hold a kind of stillness that belongs only to the present.

The second room, the Blue Room, is a complete reversal. Here, Varga Weisz invites Sophie von Hellermann to transform the gallery into a painterly reverie. They’ve never collaborated before, though their artistic friendship spans decades – first as students orbiting each other in Düsseldorf, then reconnected through shared friends and parallel paths across London and beyond.

Von Hellermann paints directly onto the gallery walls in watery shades of blue – a colour both artists love – evoking imagined lives and scenes from an old Hong Kong flat with a harbour view. A kind of dream-salon begins to take shape: family portraits, surreal landscapes, fragments of myth. The mural functions like painted wallpaper, though nothing is repeated, and everything is alive.

At the centre of this fictional room stands one of Varga Weisz’s marionettes, clad in a tartan skirt found in Hong Kong. Part puppet, part collector, part spectre of colonial residue, it anchors the room like a character in a story that’s still being written. Around it, von Hellermann’s paintings, Varga Weisz’s sculptures – including her Cabinet – and small details that reward close attention.

Together, their works share a kind of soft theatricality, weightless but grounded, playful but serious. The figures shift, the room breathes, the fantasy never fully resolves. But in this dense, mysterious setting, what emerges is a shared language – one rooted not in similarity, but in deep understanding.

If Condition I-VI is about intimacy and raw immortalisation, Blue Room is all maximalist imagination. Together, the two rooms form a complete universe, inviting viewers to step outside of fixed categories and wander, instead, through stories, impressions, and slight shifts.