Can a bronze figure little more than a foot high, cast in Lower Saxony and destined for a quiet Tuscan museum, compel a nation of continental scale to reconsider the nature of its power? The question sounds almost frivolous until one stands before the work itself—or rather, until one confronts the deliberate decision that keeps it from American soil.
Marita Vollborn’s ARES, created in 2015 and now existing as a limited bronze edition, is not a classical revival. There is no idealized musculature, no heroic stance. The figure is raw, compressed, emotionally charged: the Greek god of war rendered as obsession made flesh—bloodthirsty, without mercy, perpetually hungry for new victims. Vollborn has said that more than eighty million deaths in two world wars have proved insufficient to halt the arms race or the rhetoric that feeds it. The sculpture does not illustrate this observation; it embodies the continuity of appetite. Bronze, traditionally the material of monuments to emperors and generals, here becomes the medium of moral indictment. Compact yet dense with charge, ARES forces an intimate confrontation. One does not admire it from a respectful distance; one is drawn into its gravitational field of unease.
The artist’s biography lends the work a particular gravity. Born in 1965 in Erfurt, in the German Democratic Republic, Vollborn grew up under a regime that policed thought, censored philosophy and literature, and treated art as either propaganda or threat. She witnessed the fall of the Wall and the subsequent disappointments of reunification—experiences that later informed both her investigative journalism and her turn, around 2010, to sculpture. Her project Sinn und Scherben (“Sense and Shards”) comprises some fifty works that probe human ambivalence: strength and fragility, power and guilt. ARES occupies the confrontational extreme of that spectrum. The woman who once exposed systemic corruption in science, healthcare, and industry now gives form to forces that language alone cannot fully capture. Sculpture, for her, is the necessary counterpoint to fact-based writing: the place where the unspoken and the unspeakable take physical shape.
What elevates the present moment beyond ordinary artistic protest is Vollborn’s explicit refusal to exhibit ARES in the United States under current conditions. She respects the democratic choice of the American electorate. She does not question the legitimacy of the vote. What she declines to accept is the erosion of institutional restraints—the checks and balances that prevent any single center of power from acting without accountability, particularly in foreign affairs. References to renewed imperial gestures, including speculative claims on sovereign territories such as Greenland, and the casual contemplation of military options, are for her symptoms of a deeper regression. “Wars are a no-go,” she has stated flatly. Even the open threat of force against sovereign lands must be rejected by any society that still claims civilization. As long as those restraints feel unreliable and travel for critical voices no longer feels predictably safe, she prefers European and international platforms where open discourse remains possible. This is not a boycott born of hostility. It is a principled withdrawal. The absence of ARES from American galleries and museums becomes itself a statement—perhaps more eloquent than the sculpture’s physical presence could be.
Can such a gesture, and the work that motivates it, trigger an Umdenken—a genuine rethinking—in the United States?
History offers both encouragement and caution. Guernica traveled and retained its power across borders. Goya’s Disasters of War and Käthe Kollwitz’s mourning figures continue to indict long after the specific conflicts that produced them. Art that refuses to flatter power has always possessed a residual capacity to disturb the moral imagination. Yet the American public sphere of 2026 is not the one that once absorbed European modernism with relative openness. Polarization has hardened into mutual incomprehension. Foreign critique is readily dismissed as interference, elitism, or anti-Americanism. A work that names militarism and greed without nationality may still be nationalized by its interpreters. Those who already distrust concentrated executive power may find in ARES a confirmation; those who do not may see only an outsider’s presumption.
Still, the refusal itself complicates easy dismissal. By withholding the sculpture, Vollborn denies American institutions the opportunity to absorb and neutralize the critique through exhibition. The work cannot be domesticated by wall texts that soften its edge or by collectors who treat political intensity as marketable authenticity. Americans who wish to encounter ARES must travel to Chianciano Terme between 15 and 29 August 2026, or engage with the debate that surrounds its absence. In an age of frictionless digital circulation, the insistence on physical and political distance reasserts the stubborn materiality of both art and principle.
A true Umdenken would require more than aesthetic shock. It would demand recognition that democracy is not exhausted by the counting of votes; that institutional restraints are not optional ornaments but the difference between self-government and the raw exercise of will; that the logic of dominance, once normalized, does not remain confined to foreign policy but eventually corrodes the domestic order that claims to authorize it. Vollborn’s sculpture does not lecture on these matters. It simply presents the face of the god who has never been satisfied and asks, quietly and without consolation, whether we still possess the capacity to refuse him.
It is unlikely that a single bronze figure will redirect the course of a superpower. Art rarely engineers sudden conversion. What it can do, and what ARES in its present exile already does, is keep open a space in which the appetite for unrestricted power is not allowed to pass as normal. In that modest, persistent sense, the god who will not cross the Atlantic has already begun his work.
