The painter and author Sylvia Wolff
From an essay by the art critic Dr. Hanne Landbeck
„Angels play a great role in Sylvia Wolff's work - beings that sway their wings between heaven and earth."
Wolff's painted angels are always in motion - tracing arcs, swaying, shimmering across richly layered grounds and lending them a lightness that recalls Marc Chagall's in-between beings.
„From the paintings comes the strength of a calm and certainty that is most unusual in our time."
The paintings do not shy from grand, almost forbidden themes: angels appear, souls dwell in houses, lights descend from above - self-evident, natural and unassuming all at once.
„The shrill godlessness of our age receives here a quietly grounded counterpart - like a gift."
Like her angels, Sylvia Wolff possesses a gentle presence that holds its ground without needing to assert itself - attuned to in-between tones and atmospheres and giving them form in her art.
„She moves from word to image and from image to word - often binding the two dimensions directly together."
For all the storms and often forceful reds, each painting carries a quiet strength - not stillness, but oscillation, movement, becoming - and the promise of it.
Read together, the pastels and writings form a single contemporary body of spiritual art: biblical motifs approached as living questions rather than settled iconography, sacred scenes rendered in soft chalk on cardboard, and a German pictorial language that speaks with equal care to the secular visitor and to those at home in the Christian tradition.
I welcome every message - about exhibitions, purchases, or simply out of interest in the work.
