ART ISLANDS:Paros-Show Time

The project “Show Time” consists entirely of drawings, sculptures and paintings by artists of the new generation, the entire exhibition refers to a cabiné des curiosités of contemporary art in Greece in 2021, without thematic or chronological axis, but all the works are original and anthropomorphic. The participating artists come from different fields of creation, which forms a multifaceted and hybrid character.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Athanasiadou Gallery Archive

The project “Show Time” is a mosaic of works that each adds a note of creation and reflection. The works with a light and sometimes humorous mood, raise key issues that concern both the contemporary artists and the post-covid travelers. Yiorgos Aggelopoulos uses contemporry industrial materials that create the illusion of a digital image. His search focuses on allegorical situations where in the seemingly anarchic “landscape” a zoom of a detail takes place. The “random”, the manual, through a purely personal and very precise process is transformed into a well-organized visual environment. Dimitris Ameladiotis with a meticulous and persistent management in various materials, such as fabric, wood, metal, plastic, rope… creates strange combinations, resembling trophies, ships, compasses or mandalas. Kostis Velonis’ work focuses on highlighting the contradictions that arise from the social dimension of the concept of freedom as well as on redefining ethics through the experience of privacy. Ingo Dunnebier works on photographic processes without a camera, mostly photograms and chemograms. Giorgos Gerontides produces a specific system of preservation and archiving of objects which outline a character in order to tell a story. The main element of Nikos Goulis’ work is man and his behavior. His sources are varied. Endless hours of reading books and scientific journals as well as internet research bring him in contact with distant cultures, folklore myths, epic people and animals, symbols, situations very often unfamiliar to us. The iconography in the painting of Rania Emmanouilidou attributes mental states, in which the female figure as the central emblem supports the main narrative structure. By creating painting compositions that hover between reality and dreamy atmosphere with a disturbing and introverted tone, the visual artist renders personal memories as a universal symbol. The brothers Marjano and Denis Kapurani, or Kapurani Bros, as they are better known, are an artistic duo, for which the creative process is strongly symbiotic. Their joint work extends from the conception to the creation of the works of art and the selection of the exhibition space. In their works they use a variety of expressive means from painting and sculpture to installations and video art and explore the origin and principles of art, as well as its possible future direction. We could say that their work is a practical historiography of art. Fotini Kariotaki experiments with various mediums such as large or small scale installations, painting, collage, video, using a broad range of materials and techniques, mainly researching social awareness, the ambiguity of notions, events and reality. With her work, Georgia Kotretsos critiques the conformity of seeing by studying, proposing and practicing liberating and anarchic approaches of looking at art in an effort to support that seeing is site-specific and spectatorial emancipation the source of our art knowledge. Through her research-based practice, she encourages speculative approaches on how knowledge is and/or could be produced. Dimitris Tzoumouranis has been living and working in Berlin since the ‘90s, his career is remarkable, he is collaborating with Galerie Michael Haas in Berlin and Switzerland, his visual world evokes historical, mythological and religious themes already familiar to the viewer like the Mexican Day of the Dead or the Tarot Cards. The artist combines images distributed by mass media with his own cultural identity as well as Art History to produce works of art that seem familiar, but at the same time take a unique position within the tradition of contemporary painting. In her new work, Maro Fasouli focuses on manual labor and folk tradition, but completely deconstructed and repositioned in a new-contemporary context. The artist approaches and presents her subject, in a hedonistically sharp and ultimately expressionist way just like the painting of the German  Die Neuen Wilden artists in the late 1970s and 1980s. In her workthe viewer can distinguish influences and writings from artists such as El Anatsui, Beatriz Milhazes or Sheila Hicks, but Fasouli appropriates them and creates a new artistic result, which gives them her personal stamp.

Participating Artists: Yiorgos Aggelopoulos, Dimitris Ameladiotis, Ingo Dunnebier, Rania Emmanouilidou, Maro Fasouli, Giorgos Gerontides, Paris Giachoustidis, Nikos Goulis, Kapurani bro, Fotini Kariotaki, Georgia Kotretsos, Apostolos Ntelakos, Alexandros Touliopoulos Lina Theodorou, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Kostis Velonis, Woozy and Michalis Zacharias.

Photo: Left: Exhibition view: Show Time, Athanasiadou Gallery-Paros, 2021, Courtesy Athanasiadou Gallery. Right: Alexandros Touliopoulos, Implants, 2019, plastic, metal, wood, stone, hook, 45x50x170 cm (sculpture 45x50x75 cm, © Alexandros Touliopoulos, Courtesy the artist and Athanasiadou Gallery

Info: Curator: Marina Athanasiadou, Athanasiadou Gallery, Marpissa Logaras, Paros island, Cyclades, Greece, Duration: July-September 2021, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-14:00 & 18:00-22:00, www.athanasiadougallery.gr