State of Concept
Athens

The works presented in the exhibition trail on the common ground of recollection. Bofiliou and Panagiototoulou form a present through incidents, symbols and qualities that occurred, existed or revealed themselves in the past. The result is for both to create a new field of exploration, to give new value and significance to otherwise “normal”, “banal” or even “unimportant” impressions, images and habits. Subtle, comic and at times grave, the works linger between thought and memory.

Panagiotopoulou’s series of works “X ways of looking at a landscape” combine abstract landscapes of palms, moons and suns with the drawing-by-numbers SMILE, popular amongst teenagers in the ’90s. It comprises of a drawing in two parts, three paintings and a broken terracotta relief. In these works ‘landscape’ is approached as an affirmation of the idea of a physical world, as a mirage and as a mechanism of escape. In “The promise of a generation”, the incitement to happiness experienced when looking at a sunset from a beach as well as the clich? of painting a sunset are subverted by being elevated to a state of objecthood, to be looked at as a territory of wish fulfillment rather than as a real place. “Maybe a landscape, maybe a knot”, comprises of three paintings of the same theme, painted as if in three consecutive color phases of the hour of twilight. In both works the final letter “e” is missing, cutting the complete utterance of the word ‘smile’ in half and replacing it with an incomplete brushstroke or line. This marks a move from utterance to internalized experience, a swallowed sound that echoes and turns into a sign. “The archaeology of escape” , the earliest work in the series, is a broken terracotta relief of a desert landscape at noon.

Bofiliou’s work questions symbols, social practices, experience and memory, primeval mysticism and contemporary inwardness. Mass consumption, power, sexuality as a stereotype, the very subjective perceptions of reality and the diminished objectivity are underlined or highlighted through her work. It explores how society produces “waste” in order to justify its existence and to reproduce itself, which justifies the rap of “lack of productive discipline” of its members. Moving against the possession and collection of objects, the way that civilization has been imposed on our nomadic souls, the works exhibited here can be used practically, such as: the blue head as a footstool, the purple enlarged pebble can massage your feet or your crotch, the sited figure as a moving monster to scare the children. The hanged eyes can replace a spoken joke and the painted (also enlarged) pebble can be sold at a summer island.

Margarita Bofiliou (b.1979, Athens) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She has received an MA in Fine Arts, from the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited in Greece in galleries, museums and institutions such as Remap2 where she showed with IBID Gallery (GB). She has also exhibited in Belgium, Great Britain, Germany and France. She has been awarded with the 1st Prize of the Spyropoulos Foundation and has been a nominee for the Future Generation Art Prize.

Aliki Panagiotopoulou (b. 1980, Athens) studied Painting at the Athens School of Fine Art and received an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Art, London in 2005. She has been a resident of ISCP in NY during 2012. She is currently based in Athens, Greece. She has exhibited in Greece and abroad. Recent exhibitions and projects include ‘At Table and in Bed’, Andreas Melas and Helena Papadopoulos Gallery, Athens (2013), Evil (The Kreuzberg Biennial) Palais de Tokyo, Paris (cur. Jannis Varelas, 2012), Petrosphere / Glasgow International – ReMap3, Cabinets of Miracles (cur. P. Kosmadaki and C. Marinos, 2010), Personal-Political / 2nd Thessaloniki Biennial (2009).