print March 2008

Maria Zervou

In this exhibition, Maria Zervou’s recent video installations and drawings were bracketed between two earlier videos, demonstrating the continuity of her work over the past five years. The show opened with Out of Silk, 2002, which was projected onto a piece of silk hanging in the ground-floor gallery. The video shows a scene of a woman struggling desperately with the buttons on her diaphanous wedding dress, juxtaposed with one—in the top section of the screen—of a silkworm engaged in the programmed activity of spinning its cocoon. The piece that closed the exhibition, Laundry, 2002, is a glowing

print November 2006

Christiana Soulou

Christiana Soulou has an extraordinary gift for drawing, her chosen vehicle of expression, and she reminds us of the inherent power of the line. Her unrestrained reverence for the medium is imparted to the viewer—and yet her lines are broken. They are outlines with gaps that are as important as the line itself; gaps that complete the drawings and render them exquisitely elusive. Handling her line with unmistakable care and delicacy lest in its wispy fragility it slip away and vanish, she demonstrates her unconditional exaltation of it. The very tenuousness of her line conveys her passion for

print March 2006

“The Gesture”

The Gesture: A Visual Library in Progress” is a Greek-Italian production whose ultimate aim is the establishment of a library to make video works accessible to a broader public. Organized by curators Marina Fokidis, Sergio Risaliti, and Daphne Vitali, it traveled to the Quarter–Centro Produzione Arte, Florence (where Risaliti is artistic director). The pivotal interest in this project lies in the gesture and the gesturing body as it has been explored in video and photography from the ’60s to the present, with a focus on performance, action, and bodily experience that underline social, political,

print April 2004

“Outlook”

How does one go about organizing the first big international art exhibition in Athens, a city that still does not possess a full-fledged contemporary art museum? How does one confront the fact that modern Greek society is still in many ways quite traditional and, further, that religious sentiments still run deep? Using what parameters might one create a show that adequately reflects its time while remaining comprehensible to an audience that, while demonstrating a genuine curiosity about contemporary art, has had little exposure to it—despite the fact that Greece boasts a number of serious,

print Summer 2002

Deanna Maganias

In the opening passage of William Faulkner’s Light in August, Lena Grove, unwed and pregnant, is in search of the father of her unborn child. Throughout her wanderings she keeps imagining she has already reached her destination. Lena’s mental state, her belief that she is already there without actually having to arrive, seems to deny the reality of her physical being. All that counts is her inner world.

Some of the works in DeAnna Maganias’s first solo show, which consisted of several installations, ingeniously devised, involving small, impeccably handcrafted objects, explored analogous states

print April 2001

“Thrilos 2001”

In Greek, thrilos means “legendary” or “heroic.” Today, the epithet is often bestowed on star soccer teams and players by their fans. “Thrilos 2001,” sponsored by the Olympiakos soccer team and held in the warehouses of the K. Sarantopoulos flow mills, pairs high art with an apparently incompatible subject, the massively popular sport of soccer. Some of the artists took their cues from the game itself or from the red-and-white Olympiakos banner to create works specifically for this show; others, like Wim Delvoye, Yiannis Gaitis, Jeff Koons, and Yiannis Tsarouchis, were included because of their

print December 1999

“Metro: New Trends In Contemporary Greek Art 1999”

“Metro,” not “Metropolis” (a title used by curators Christos Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal for a 1991 show in Berlin), was the name Dan Cameron gave to the exhibition he curated for the Deste Foundation. This truncated word was an accurate expression of the concept governing Cameron’s show: the end of the metropolis, or center of the city, as the traditional engine of culture, in the face of globalization, bolstered by digital communication systems that render one’s physical location inconsequential and privilege one’s ability to “connect.”

Cameron chose nine young artists, born between 1962

print March 1996

Nikos Baikas

For more than a decade Nikos Baikas has been creating enigmatic works in black and white. In his most recent drawings on paper, lead pencil lines have been so densely applied that the paper supports seem to merge with their skinlike surfaces. The result is paper that has been rendered so relieflike by bulges and dents that it resembles a sheet of lead. The compositions are tightly structured, with an acute surface tension, and the images that appear are highly stylized. Any modeling is minimal, and pictorial depth is scant, so the viewer must dig deep and hard to discern the objects hidden within

print May 1995

George Hadjimichalis

George Hadjimichalis’ forte is his perfect orchestration of installation, painting, and a conceptual approach. His most recent installation, Interpretation of Points on the Opposite Side, 1994, was comprised of three parts: two very large paintings hung on opposite walls and a long, narrow, glass-topped display cabinet stretched across the width of the gallery, bridging the paintings. One almost completely black painting, with a slightly raised surface, depicted a map of an imaginary seaport. The painting opposite was a smooth gray/black square and represented an enormous celestial chart on

print March 1994

Philip Tsiaras

Comfortably straddling abstraction and figuration, Philip Tsiaras’ “Topologies” brings the question of pictorial depth into focus. Tsiaras (who, until recently, seemed essentially pledged to the articulation of the sensual and primordial in works replete with evocations of the unconscious) appears now to have taken on the exploration of formal and material issues in painting as well. Although undoubtedly “old hat,” they remain, for him, inexhaustible and constantly renewable problems. Also exhibited were smaller works on paper, bearing strikingly lovely and limpid images, while the third body

print May 1991

Theodoros

In 1963 Theodoros appropriated Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, 1913, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the readymade and paying homage to Duchamp. He incorporated it into a sculpture entitled Insect Perdu à la Roue de Bicyclette (Lost insect with bicycle wheel, 1963), which was attached to the wheel and suspended in midair. The inverted wheel—no longer a readymade—became the base or pedestal of a sculpture.

In this show, Theodoros once again turned to the bicycle wheel, as well as to other objects used in his earlier works. Set in this new context, the objects and signs did not change meaning;

print January 1991

Jason Molfessis

When Jason Molfessis moved from Greece to Paris in 1950, his relationship to modern technology was brought into sharp relief. Yet he continued to reference his ancient heritage, and more pertinently pre-Socratic philosophical thought, affirming the tenuous but persistent link in the Greek consciousness between the ancient and modern world. Molfessis’ oeuvre is comprised largely of installations, and this exhibition, dominated by the two large projects, Steel Ring and Fusion ‘C’ (both 1990), was characterized by a machine-made quality, exemplified by both the manufactured steel parts and the

Catherine Cafopoulos