EUGENIA APOSTOLOU
On Thursday, May 4th from 19:00 to 22:00, Eugenia Apostolou’ s solo exhibition titled Exercises in Tail Autotomy, curated by Dimitrios Antonitsis, opens at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center.
The exhibition will be on view until 29.07.2023.
In her second solo exhibition at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, titled Exercises in Tail Autotomy, artist Eugenia Apostolou introduces a new manner of artistic creation. The artworks of this era of her oeuvre consist of gauzes intertwined with solid pieces of paint, thus transcending the boundaries of the conventional canvas and reconstituting the concept of painting.
As the curator of the exhibition Dimitrios Antonitsis notes: “Apostolou resorts to a kind of description, certainly unrealistic, but with a trick that the American poet Wallace Stevens has called “description without place”. Instead, she creates a potential space of her own in the form of a background: bits of paint from earlier works overlaid with gauzes. In this way, the artist disconnects herself from the terrain and its permeability, which she has after all been fighting for the past decades. Now, these new works acquire an innovative depth, which in turn coincides with the artist’s real Being. Such an artistic vision distills from the confused reality a deeper vocabulary of the painter. Remaining Doric in the two-dimensional, she displays gesturality in the third dimension; The sculptural quality of Apostolou’s works has resulted from a systematically premeditated control of the first level, pure painting. It thus flows into the freedom of three-dimensional transparency after the establishment of strict form. Besides, the gauzes and their sculptural part make these works a survival strategy. Under the prism of survival and panic management, Apostolou’s autotomy resembles a magician’s strategy. The “magician”, while using various tricks to direct the audience’s attention to irrelevant parts of the stage, carries out unnoticed what is necessary for “the miracle” to occur, for “the magic” to be created. Indeed, the artist seduces us with her new work, while at its core it is a displacement and a literal recycling of the old.”
Excerpt from Dimitrios Antionitsi’s text for the exhibition Exercises in Tail Autotomy
Visiting hours: Tue – Thu: 15:00 – 20:00, Wed – Fri: 12:00 – 20:00, Saturday: 12:00 – 16:00
