The thermal steam of Chianciano Terme still hung over the medieval lanes when the ninth Biennale closed at the end of August 2026, as if the town itself could not decide whether it wished to remain a spa or become, at last, an art city. For two weeks the Museo d’Arte and thirteen galleries in the historic centre held some three hundred artists from more than fifty countries: free admission, a catalogue, cash prizes, and that peculiar Tuscan mixture of province and international ambition that makes such exhibitions hard to place and harder to dismiss.
The Grand Prize went to Del Giudice for a mixed-media work that takes its title from a speech by Giorgia Meloni — Donne, Madre, Cristiana. First prize in painting went to the American Marcus Robins; first in sculpture to Noam of the Netherlands. Around them clustered dozens of special mentions: ninety-six awards in all, winners from twenty-eight countries. The pattern is familiar — a little politics, a little body, a little digital work, a great deal of oil on canvas. It is not contemptible. It is the honest picture of a scene that organises itself through an open call, a forty-euro submission fee, and a jury drawn from museum, gallery and criticism.
Among the ten artists automatically selected for the London Art Biennale 2027, one name does not sit neatly in the prize tables and lingers all the more for that: Marita Vollborn, bronze sculpture ARES, 2015, Germany.
Vollborn, born in Erfurt in 1965, is a journalist first. She studied agronomy in the GDR, journalism in Hanover, and spent years in investigative science writing; several of her books sit in the library of the Bundestag and in the Library of Congress. Since 2010 she has worked in clay and bronze. The project is called Sinn und Scherben — Sense and Shards: some fifty figures that treat ambivalence not as a slogan but as form — power and guilt, strength and fracture. ARES belongs to the sharper end of that series.
The sculpture is small, roughly thirty-four by twenty-nine by thirty centimetres, a limited bronze edition of twelve. It does not present a heroic war god. It presents a body that does not gather energy so much as radiate it: unrestrained, menacing, without classical beauty. Vollborn has said the work was made in 2015 and feels as if it were made for the present. More than eighty million dead in two world wars were not enough, she argues, to halt the arms race or the incitement to war. ARES is not a simple anti-war message. It is the question of who profits from conflict.
That this figure should travel from the Tuscan rooms to Chelsea, to the Old Town Hall on the King’s Road, has something almost literary about it. The London Art Biennale 2027 — the eighth edition, curated by the same constellation of the International Confederation of Art Critics, the Chianciano Art Museum and Gagliardi Gallery — promises some three hundred and fifty positions from sixty nations and £13,000 in cash prizes. No theme, museum quality, according to the organisers. From the hills between Siena and Montepulciano to the King’s Road. From thermal water to London rain. ARES takes the road with it.
Vollborn has said publicly that she does not at present wish to exhibit the sculpture in the United States — not out of anti-Americanism, she insists, but from concern for checks and balances and the conditions of critical discourse. American visitors in Chianciano were welcome; the figure is not aimed at a nation but at militarism and profiteering wherever they appear. One may share the stance or find it overpointed. A feuilleton need not decide. It need only record that a German sculptor from the former GDR prefers her god of war to stand in a Tuscan spa town, and later in Chelsea, rather than under the present political weather across the Atlantic.
There are biennales that press world events into pavilion format. Chianciano does not. It is smaller, more open, occasionally more miscellaneous. That is why ARES cut so sharply there: not as the statement of a national team, but as compact bronze one could walk around, its surface still holding the light of August evenings while the baths steamed outside. Prize lists fade. The ten names bound for London remain a little longer. Among them is a figure that neither glorifies the god of war nor moralises him away, but shows him as a mechanism — and is, for that reason, more inconvenient than many a grand prize.
Whether Chelsea in 2027 will give that inconvenience room, or fold it into a representative ensemble, remains to be seen. Until then ARES stands where art in Tuscany so often stands: between healing water and the market, between the cure and critique, between a town that wishes to recover and a sculpture that will not.
The Chianciano Art Museum has since taken one of the twelve existing casts of ARES into its permanent collection.
