Post by Marita Vollborn

"Yet the sculpture’s significance transcends the exhibition. In a time when cultural discourse often favors irony, detachment, or algorithmic ephemerality, Vollborn offers something rarer: moral seriousness without didacticism. ARES does not preach; it provokes. It demands that we look—not glance—at the persistence of war in the human psyche. As global rearmament accelerates and authoritarian impulses resurface, the work serves as a timely memento mori for our illusions of progress. It echoes Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, gazing upon the ruins, yet rooted firmly in the material weight of bronze rather than ethereal critique. Marita Vollborn’s ARES thus arrives not as a relic of 2015 but as a prophecy fulfilled. In the serene setting of Chianciano, it disrupts complacency, inviting visitors—artists, collectors, and thinkers alike—to reckon with the god who still walks among us. In doing so, it reaffirms sculpture’s ancient power: to make the invisible visible, the eternal urgent, and the monstrous all too human. One leaves the encounter not soothed, but awakened—precisely the role great art must play in turbulent times."