City of Athens Cultural Centre “Melina” | October 8 – November 20, 2022
The City of Athens presents the exhibition, But today it’s different, which includes the latest painting work of Katerina Papazisi. The City of Athens Culture, Sports and Youth Organization will organise the exhibition at the Melina Cultural Center from October 8 to November 20, 2022.
The artist attempts to restore pleasure as an intrinsic trait of painting, and she does so by examining, among other things, the narrative bodies in Rubens and Delacroix’s paintings. She creates ‘flesh landscapes’, which refer to fluid materiality, where inside and outside, space and form, forms lose their boundaries and become one. Papazisi uses images from mass culture, pornographic magazines and current affairs.
Papazisis’ painting celebrates the body, whereas fleshy desire is deconstructed through colour. The heavenly and spring symphonies are transformed into scenes of Dionysian orgies. The romantic sensuality, omnipresent in the Grand Masters’ paintings, such as Rubens’ Nymphs and Satyrs (1640), on which her large-scale triptych First We Take Manhattan is based, is reinterpreted through variations, multiple versions of the same subject, giving the heaviness of the figures a lighter feel, without depriving them of their libidinal allure. Papazisi’s painting owes much to Willem de Kooning and, in particular, to his 1960s works, which had puzzled critics at the time. However, nudity in her painting is not just that, or at least it is not nudity per se that she is interested in studying. As she clearly states: “I want to talk about flesh, about carnality as colour and movement.
“Papazisis’s works are here to enrich a tradition – erotic art – that in modern Greece, strangely enough, has not found much response. It is certainly interesting that this work on corporeality and the narrative possibilities of the body emerged at the present juncture, where the pandemic has forced social distancing. As the artist points out: “My work evolved within the context of the last two years, where I became even more rooted in the studio as a way to exist, travel, and get lost. The sizes grew to accommodate the action of my whole body and ultimately to create the space where the world of painting per se would embrace me.” Papazisi frames her fleshy painting with a series of abstract ceramic sculptures, largely improvisational, with no reference to a specific image. There is only the artist’s body, the materials and the action.
Katerina Papazisi is an Athens-based visual artist. Her studio practice is rooted in painting and includes collage, sculpture and installations. It is based on a deep connection with colour and the physicality of the process. Her early studies include Social Psychology (BSc) and Communications (MSc) at the London School of Economics. Later, she continued at Central Saint Martins (MA) and the Athens School of Fine Arts in the painting department, from which she graduated in 2006. Her first solo exhibition, What is not, was presented in 2014 in an independent space. In 2019, the Eugenides Foundation presented a small retrospective exhibition of her works. Recent group exhibitions: Editions of the Garden, The Symptom Projects, Amfissa 2018; Places of Creation, Averoff Gallery, Metsovo 2019 and Mötley Crew, Triantaros Primary School, Tinos 2021. Creating environments as an exhibition condition is at the centre of her exhibition practice. She did that in the solo and group exhibitions she has curated in her house to be demolished (16 PlastiraSt – Disposable Gallery, 2006, a group project that represented Greece at the Biennale of Young Artists in Puglia in 2008) and in her studio/home (Domestic Matter, 2017).
The exhibition is curated by Christoforos Marinos, an art historian and curator of the OPANDA exhibitions and activities.
The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 8, from 18:00-22:00
Duration of the exhibition: October 8- November 20, 2022
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday 11:00 – 19:00; Saturday – Sunday 10:00 – 15:00. The exhibition will be closed on Mondays.
Free Admission
Web: www. opanda. gr
