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Garden of Virtues

The collection of paintings "Garden of Virtues" is very important in my oeuvre, because it contains 12 special works: my Zodiac series, which are all small in size and resemble portraits – portraits of the virtues. My initial aim when creating these portraits, however, was not at all to create paintings related to the Zodiac. In fact, I simply set out to paint the virtues as best as I could. During the course of my work I discovered that portraying a virtue in all its purity is not an easy task, since a virtue is something complicated, intangible, something that for Aristotle – the great philosopher of antiquity – is a quality which is the mean between its excess and its deficiency. Just as ruining the balance between this excess and deficiency can lead to a virtue becoming a vice, so too the addition of incompatible qualities to a virtue can render its portrayal entirely impossible. Nevertheless, I ... read more