Vulnerable (masked), 2024

Stone and Bronze,

app. 60cm x 52cm x 147cm high;

Vanessa Paschakarnis presents Vulnerable (masked), a sculpture in Bardiglio marble and bronze that marks a pivotal moment in her practice — the first work in which she placed a bronze mask on a stone beast, establishing a formal and philosophical grammar that runs through all her subsequent stone-and-bronze works.
The work has its own history of vulnerability. In its original form, the sculpture was entirely stone: a stele in blue-grey Bardiglio marble from which a horned animal head emerges, with two great spiralling ram's horns carved from Rosa Portugal — the warm, flesh-pink marble traditionally used by stone carvers to approximate Caucasian human skin. The choice was deliberate and searching: power made from the material of the body it is supposed to defend. The horns began to fracture the face from within. The sculpture was breaking under the stress of its own structure.
Paschakarnis made moulds of the head and horns, severed them from the block, carved the stone surface back, and cast both in bronze. The result is not a repair but a transformation: a sculpture that carries its own history of damage and remaking in its very material, whose bronze mask — smooth, self-aware, worn openly — is the face the creature chose after the original could not hold. The head tilts back, throat fully exposed. The great bronze horns, ranging from warm amber to deep umber, curl in resting position — not weapons raised in threat but armour laid down in presence.
This is the work's central paradox and its enduring power: strength and vulnerability are not opposites here but aspects of the same condition. The most powerful creature in the room is also the most open. The horns do not protect the exposed throat; the exposed throat does not diminish the horns. Each intensifies the other — a meditation on what Paschakarnis calls the strength of fragility, made physical, made permanent, made impossible to look away from.
Vanessa Paschakarnis (b. Werneck, Germany, 1970) holds dual MFA degrees from Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and NSCAD University, Halifax. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Thiel Collection, Switzerland, among others. She lives and works between Nova Scotia, Canada and Pietrasanta, Italy.

The horns are armour in resting position, says Vanessa Paschakarnis, — not weapons, but the capacity for power, laid down. The throat is exposed. Both things are true at once. This is what she means with the strength of fragility: not that the two are reconciled, but that they cannot be separated. The creature stands in both simultaneously, and asks you to do the same.