2014-16 COLLECTION: DAS ATELIER VON MINERVA

Das Atelier von Minerva is the inaugural collection of María Verónica Arís Zlatar’s artistic path. It marks a decisive moment in which the desire to live philosophy, rather than merely write about it, led her to drawing as a primary mode of thought. This body of work emerges from a conscious displacement: choosing the vitality and authenticity of philosophical thinking as a lived practice over its institutionalized academic forms.

Executed in charcoal on Fabriano paper (50 × 70 cm), the drawings combine two complementary tendencies. On one hand, an academic sensitivity to form through shading and tonal construction; on the other, a graphic and illustrative use of line, contrast, and handwritten text. This tension between image and inscription is not explanatory but constitutive: thought unfolds on the surface of the drawing itself.

The works portray imagined characters placed in explicitly philosophical roles or scenes. Their inner life is staged through a contrast between the intensity of their gaze and their surrounding space, which often dissolves into abstraction. What is at stake is not portraiture in the conventional sense, but the dramatization of thinking as an existential activity — attentive, vulnerable, and situated in everyday life.

Rather than addressing philosophy as a theoretical system, Das Atelier von Minerva investigates its archetypal incarnations: figures in which ideas take bodily, affective, and ethical form, both inside and outside academia. The collection functions as a call to return to thinking as self-responsibility, resisting the inertia of bureaucratic production. Philosophy appears here as something that must be assumed, inhabited, and risked.

This foundational collection already establishes a structural principle that runs through Arís Zlatar’s later work: each body of work proposes a shift in the conditions from which perception and meaning arise. In Das Atelier von Minerva, that shift consists in relocating philosophical inquiry from conceptual abstraction to lived, visual, and embodied experience.

Only a curated selection of three drawings from this collection is presented online, each representative of this inaugural moment:

• The Arrival of Minerva

• The Thinker and His Conceptual Kit

• The Contemporary Apology of Socrates

All works are charcoal on Fabriano paper.

The arrival of Minerva (2014)
2014-16 Collection: Das Atelier von Minerva
María Verónica Arís
Charcoal on paper, 48x68cm.
Leuven, Belgium.

The Philosopher and the Conceptual Kit (2014)
2014-16 Collection: Das Atelier von Minerva
María Verónica Arís
Charcoal on paper, 54x74cm.
Brussels, Belgium.

The Contemporary Apology of Socrates (2016)
2014-16 Collection: Das Atelier von Minerva
María Verónica Arís
Charcoal on paper, 54x74cm.
Brussels, Belgium.