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Commentary to "MARIAS"

The Holy Maria is enthroned in a bright plastic meadow...Blithe. Flashy. Bizarre...
With an ironic touch the artist unmasks the worship of the Holy Maria in a "Kitsch"Version.
Daily newspaper NOZ, Tom Bullmann, 5.3.2004

Object-Art of the Holy Maria with its many variations. This is not about the worshipping of saints.
An example: the Madonna, as Mother and Guardian of Nature, surrounded by blatantly cheap flashlights, almost drowns in a plastic sea of daisies. There is a hidden meaning with humor.
For example, in "l´amour II" the Holy Maria appears as guardian and patroness of love. While in "War" the Holy Virgin becomes the Mother of all Wars.
Sonia Wohlfarth pointedly illustrates and polarizes while she creates highly unusual roles for her Holy Marias.
The exhibition is at the same time ironic and profound.
Stadtblatt 03/2004

Outside it's gloomy and grey, inside it's gaudy with flashing lights... "I spent my childhood in Latin America, where churches and chapels are filled with lights and flowers."
SWS links elements from that world with items in Germany, using colorful kitsch.
e.g. Mother of Nature. On an bright green lawn, filled with white plastic daisies; red, blue and yellow plastic flowers flash intermittently. In their middle an Indian Madonna, smiling, with flowers in her hands...
The wall art-objects with their Madonnas are not only idyllic and harmonious, but also underline the contradictions of the world in the 21st century...
many of which are illustrated by the Madonnas: i.e. behind barbed wire lurks the Mother of War and the Mother of Love seduces with large red plush lips.
And all that should be the Holy Maria?
Birgit Schütte, radio SWR, Freiburg

The Holy Maria .. The Many Facetted.
Not one of the interpretations in the light boxes are obvious. Why should they be?
After all this is not about altars, devotional images or turmoil- art. It is an individual artistic approach to seize the various shapes and r^oles of the omnipresent Holy Maria.
The fact that She is needed and wanted in so many locations, makes her image ambiguous.
This complexity that inspires imagination is given maximum expression by SWS in her object boxes, by creating ever new and questionable parts for her Holy Marias, stimulating new emotions and contradictory feelings.
Prof. Martin Damus, University of Osnabrück

... In her creation "Holy Marias Make Money" the artist occupies herself with the global phenomenon of the adoration of the Virgin Mary in the past and at present.
Affect by a childhood in Latin America (Peru) the artist experienced the local folkloric mixture of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the trade with devotional objects.
Sonia Wohlfarth Steinert looked into the different ways to adore the Virgin Mary in various parts of the World. She collected material and devotional objects for the adoration of the Virgin Mary and integrated them into her "object boxes of the Holy Maria". Not only the dissociation of the Holy Maria from her erstwhile Christian context becomes apparent but also the folkloric conditioning and the adaptation of Christian concepts for the most trivial (e.g. industrial and touristy) needs.
André Lindhorst, Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche (Gallery of Art), Osnabruck