“The report does not impose its own reading. Not even that of the creator of the file. He would like to leave the viewers alone in front of the work that is looking at them, to leave it alone with them.”
Its annexM Athens Music Hall opens on December 14 the report “Giorgos Xenos – Places of contemplation“, edited by Anna Kafetsi, which completes the cycle of monographic essay exhibitions of 2022. The exhibition is hosted at the Official Court and will last until March 5, 2023.
With her torso painting on paper, the exhibition includes 102 works from various periods, most of which are coming to light for the first time from the artist’s archive. On display are large-scale wall-mounted polyps and installations composed as individual open archives, series of drawings with numerous variations of the same theme, and notebooks from his stay in Berlin to the present day. Also on display are digital photographs and short cell phone videos, an unknown artistic aspect of the painter’s multidimensional work.
As Ms. Cafetsa mentions, “with their subject, without the subject and against it, the archival sites of the works create distinct islands of order and at the same time disorder in the exhibition space, which give birth to multiple interpretations, inner paths of thought and silence, a longing for memory and going back to the beginning. At its center is placed in a circular arrangement the oversized art installation Gathering Spaces, from which the exhibition partially borrows its title. At the core of this introspective circle of reflection, which is visited by the viewer, the exhibition itself was curatorially designed around the idea of a closed/open archive of images, sounds and concepts, which is hidden and revealed, as a stage and as an avato.’
In the exhibition, public “murals” alternate with painted miniatures and inaccessible design files. Archetypal images of the house and empty interiors, labyrinths, face-numbers, shadows, cryptic writings, riddles and mythical symbols create intimate and disturbing dream topographies of confinement and freedom, interiority and contemplation, in black and white. The dream, with its Freudian meaning, an incomprehensible writing in images freed from compulsions, finds its visual analogue in the works of Giorgos Xenos. His painting as a place of meditation seeks the thought that would dream.
“The report does not impose its own reading. Not even that of the creator of the file. He would like to leave the viewers alone in front of the work that is looking at them, to leave it alone with them. To pass in silence next to him like another archival series giving time for contemplation. And let this be her own moral and political statement”, notes Mrs. Cafetsi.
Giorgos Xenos was born in 1953 in Athens. From 1976 to 1982 he studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts – Section des arts plastiques in Paris. From 1988 to 1992 he lived and worked in Berlin. Having his workshops in East and West Berlin, he experienced the historical events of the fall of the Wall. Since 1993 he lives and works in Athens. His works have been exhibited in museums in Greece and abroad.
Opening hours of the exhibition: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday (12:00 – 20:00), Thursday (12:00 – 22:00), Monday closed. Ticket price: 5 euros (general admission), 3 euros (students 6 years and older, students of HEI, TEI or equivalent schools, 65+, unemployed with presentation of OAED card, large children). Every Thursday the entrance is free for the public.
RES-EMP
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