Paloma Varga Weisz

Paloma Varga Weisz has reconstructed her father's studio for the Stommel Synagogue: a tiny room on the second floor of his wife's Wilhelminian style house in Neustadt an der Weinstraße, high up, removed from everyday life. Here Feri Varga lived in his own world, surrounded by memories - here he painted and created his works, next door to his daughter's nursery. He told Paloma in detail about his life in Hungary and later in Paris, from where he fled to Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1940. Already in Paris, he discarded his Jewish origins and henceforth called himself Varga.

In 1961 he followed his wife Leonore from Cagnes-sur-Mer to Neustadt an der Weinstraße. The step to this German provincial town meant a deep break for him – and, as a native Jew, the return to a country with which he was connected in a traumatic way. This silence has become an invisible legacy. It has had a lasting impact on the life and work of Paloma Varga Weisz.

In the former cult room of the Stommel synagogue – a place that stands for Jewish life, repression and survival in equal measure – this confrontation is condensed into a spatial memory. Feri Varga is present, silent and unapproachable. The visitor stops at the threshold. He cannot enter the room, just as history can only be imagined, but never experienced again. It is precisely at this distance that work unfolds its real power: the past remains unattainable and yet is effective with all the present.