Helga Vockenhuber: two monumental bronze sculptures in the garden of Palazzo Papadopoli, Aman Venice – Meditating on the Secret of Life

In a time tragically filled with noise like the one we are experiencing, her melodious and solemn figures come to us suspended in a great silence. They overturn our most frantic perception of time and things. Without effort, we are captivated by them. What immediately fascinates and strikes us is the vital breath that permeates them. It is the poetic magnetism of these pacified forms that opens up, once removed, possible horizons of harmony. Harmony which, in the sculptor’s spiritual perspective, always predisposes us to a feeling that is strongly attractive and inclusive, such as to “connect and bind, reconcile and jointly prepare for a contemplative inclination.”

Without a regained ecology of the soul, how is it possible to reverse collective consciousness and face all the violent threats that endanger the planet? Meditating on the secret of every life is the necessary perspective that these two works of hers exhibited here suggest to us. Note well, in their emotional and symbolic value, they lead us to rediscover how “meditating” and “healing” arise from the same root and converge towards a similar meaning.

And so, here is her first sculpted meditation. It is embodied in the bronze of this “Grande giglio del silenzio”. An emblem of the immense blossoming of every life on the planet. Here summarized in the now enlarged corolla of a tiny sea lily: the pancratium of the “Cantico dei Cantici”. A medicinal flower symbolizing an Edenic redemptive grace: a sea lily synonymous with poetry that restores to us some perceptual innocence. Poetry that heals or at least somewhat alleviates our suffering on earth.

The other meditation immerses us in the flight that every existence performs. On a large swing, a young woman’s body is gently rocking, slightly reclined. A collected or sleeping nude that has the soft profile of a landscape. To an excessive extent, it unfolds like in the undulating hills. Apatheia – The Swing of Life is the title that reveals its true condition: being a woman in listening to herself. On the scale of time, she is the one who guards in her womb the arcane miracle of another life. And this apathy does not mean the absence of emotions but rather harmonious submission to the destiny that is fulfilled in her.

Curated by Prof. Giuseppe Cordoni