Sophia Vari

Born in Vari, near Athens, in 1940 to a Greek father and Hungarian mother, Sophia Canellopoulos moved with her parents to Switzerland and England during the war and then back to Athens. She cites a meeting with the great opera diva Maria Callas as a catalyst for her professional development. She encouraged the young Sophia to pursue her creative ambitions, despite the social conventions of the time. She went on to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and began to sign her work as “Vari” in a nod to her native village. Later she married the artist Fernando Botero.

Vari initially established herself as a painter and sculptor; she has gone back and forth between the two disciplines for much of her career, and her works include monochromatic and colorful abstract sculptures, watercolors, and paper assemblages. She came to ornamental design later, in the 1990s. Vari founded her current studio in Pietrasanta, Italy, in 2002. For her “portable design” works, which include pendants, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and buttons, among other items, she forms small, often abstract, sculptural pieces in molding clay before ultimately producing them in gold, silver, or solid wood. She finds names for much of her work in Greek mythology.

Today, Vari lives in Monaco and has studios in Greece, Italy, and Bogota. Her work is included in several museums worldwide, including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas in Venezuela, the Benaki Museum in Athens, the Ulrich Museum of Art in Kansas, and the Museum Beelden aan Zee in The Netherlands.