Sophia Vari

Sophia Canellopoulou was born near Athens to a Greek father and a Hungarian mother. “Vari”, which she uses as her artist’s name, pays homage to her native town. Talking about her work, she states: “I seek to take geometry, volume and form and humanize the whole within space. ”One of her main concerns is the assimilation of her monumental polychrome sculptures in the cities where they are exhibited: Paris, Florence, Rome, Turin, Monte-Carlo, Munich, Baden-Baden, Geneva, Pietrasanta, Athens, Tenerife, Beijing, Shanghai, Madrid, Cartagena de Indias, London, to cite but a few. Complexity, elegance, and harmony come together and become one with the intended space.
She passed away in 2023 in Monaco

Since 1970, her works have been exhibited across the world in solo and group shows and as public commissions, and have been shown in numerous international fairs.

Having lived in France, Colombia, Mexico and the United States, she currently lives and works between Monaco, Italy and Greece. She is married to eminent Colombian artist Fernando Botero, and has a daughter from a first marriage.

Sophia Vari started painting at the age of 16, and soon felt the need to express herself through another medium. Travelling to Egypt in 1978, she drew fascinated and convinced of the importance of monumental sculpture. From then, she started to include bronze and marble as fundamental materials across her repertoire. Eager to cultivate her relationship to colour in her art, she began producing assemblages on canvas, in which she “no longer create[d] through volume, but through colour, all-the-while preserving the sculptural conscience and essence of form.”

Sophia Vari also gained recognition for her jewelry work. Her wearable sculptures, or sculptures-à-porter, seamlessly and gracefully fuse geometric lines and sensual curves, experimenting for the past 35 years with a wide range of noble and singular materials.

Her decades-long work has awarded her global acclaim for her ceaseless pursuit of a harmony of form and balance, a signature throughout her career and to this day.