FOTEINI PALPANA

FOTEINI PALPANA

COLOURGROUND

On Thursday, April 10th, from 18:00 to 21:00, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents Foteini Palpana’s second solo show.

The exhibition will be on view until May 31st 2025.

Foteini Palpana’s new solo exhibition at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center is a dialogue between her sculptural work and her new paintings.

The exhibition features the installation “Islands on my mind grow on my back” (2021), with the characteristic layering of cementitious materials in vibrant colours, and the painting composition “Soft Paintings: I had so much painting in me!” (oil pastel on synthetic napped fabrics), which Palpana has been working on over the past year.

The two bodies of work coexist, reflecting and expanding upon each other. The sculptures exist in space as coloured matter solidified into geological formations, while the painted images, created with “controlled spontaneity” and a playful disposition, maintain, in their abstract forms, references to the body as well as the landscape and the ground.

As Christoforos Marinos points out in the text “The Dreamscapes of Foteini Palpana,” included in the recent publication “Islands Grow” (Athens 2025) : 1

“[…] Foteini Palpana seems to have a good understanding of the limits of painting and sculptural representation of a space or place. Her latest paintings, made with oil pastel on synthetic fabrics, are created with controlled spontaneity. As she says, they contain (her) thought and at the same time they reproduce it. They constitute, therefore, preeminently reflective images. They possess the depth, weight, and impulsiveness of thought, as well as the lightness of a reflection, its sudden, lightning appearance, its fleeting path, its flash. These images are the same size, soft—due to the pile of the fabric—and abstract, without of course lacking representational traces. They are usually presented in a grid, with a small distance between them, as this better highlights the patterns of thought and the elective affinities, the relationships between the images. Seen all together, they resemble a mural that combines the rational and the expressionistic, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These images possess musicality, a rhythmology. Within this grid, you can identify condensed times, interacting different moments and mental states.Palpana’s painted images possess autonomy, clarity. […] they combine painting with drawing and sculpture. And most importantly: they are thought-images that spring from the body, from the artist’s gut. “I had so much painting in me…” she thinks as she produces these images—a phrase that may well be reformulated as a question to herself: “Did I really have so much painting in my body and didn’t know it? […]

1 The publication is an overview of the artist’s entire body of work and will be released in limited copies on the occasion of the exhibition.