About Embroidered Works

"On Petra Varl's canvasses the figural contours are carried out with classical means of drawing, albeit digitized in the further process, and by means of a computer print transferred onto the medium. But the secondary mechanical, yet manually controlled intervention of the sewing machine is key, as the sketch-like "shading" of the contour sharply cuts into the softness of the wide "aquarelle" lines and establishes ambiguous graphic effects that give the figures an entirely new and different impression of spontaneity on one hand and of torpid emblematicity on the other, which is, for instance, characteristic of David Hockney's famous Los Angeles drawings and aquarelles. It is also not insignificant that Petra Varl chooses her motifs mostly from among the images of the home photo album. The expressiveness as new added value brought about by the sharpness of the sewn line skeleton of the image and especially the zoomed-in view of the figural cut-outs, focused onto the face or a haphazard, unusually framed detail may instantly bring to mind the aquarelles of Marlene Dumas, one of the most notorious artists of our time, but in the works of Petra Varl there is no sense of unease or provocation. On the contrary, while many might want to find in her "family-household" world of motifs an essential expression of her feminine nature and to parallel it with feminist declarativity, her images are filled with such a degree of universal life energy and warmth that they can in no way be tied to vested statements in the sense of an examination of contemporary social contexts, even though a good measure of (well meaning) irony is always present in her work."

Marko Košan, 2006

Links to works:

• Embroidered portraits
• Embroidered nudes
• Miniatures on paper