Is Art Political Again?
Art has never been neutral. It only pretends to be when the times are quiet enough to allow the illusion. In calmer decades, the market preferred the decorative, the abstract, the safely personal. Then history returns with its old appetite for blood and power, and suddenly the question resurfaces with force: must art take a side? Must it name the forces that shape our lives, or may it remain a private aesthetic exercise? Marita Vollborn’s bronze sculpture ARES offers a clear, uncompromising answer. Created in 2015 and now cast in a limited edition, the work stands roughly 34 by 29 by 30 centimetres. It depicts the Greek god of war not as a heroic ideal but as a raw, menacing, almost bestial presence — the embodiment of unrestrained violence, militarism and the greed that feeds on conflict. Vollborn, born in…

