July 2024 Newsletter: Rena Papaspyrou Artwork

Mary Zagoritou of Mary Zagoritou Gallery has experienced the beauty of Rena Papaspyrou exhibition at the National Gallery of Greece, Athens. Rena Papaspyrou, born 1938 in Athens, where she continues to live and work, is a Greek visual artist and Professor Emeritus at the Athens School of Fine Arts. In 1992, she became the first female to lead a studio at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where she taught until 2005. She studied painting and mosaics at the Ahens School of Fine Arts from 1958 to 1961 and then to 1967 at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Rather than working on canvas, she is known for her choice of unconventional surfaces such as planks, metal aheets and walls, even bricks, segments of wall and mosaic from old houses and industrial spaces, affirming their artistic material nature. Since the '90s, she has created many large inatallations and environments. The present exhibition at the Athens National Gallery, courtesy of the artist, is called Images of Matter and depicts a woman figure emerging in space. The artworks refer to the relationship between the matter and the gaze of the creator. The process of association is creating freely aesthetic images. The artist creates female images on floor tiles, intervening with ink. Each tile is an element is 30 x 30 cm dimension and the combined tiles create an overall artwork of 210 x90 x 30 cm. Another synthesis are Episodes in Matter (1977) detached wall surface of 147,5 x 59 cm where the intervention is made with colour. One wall creation is called The Ultimate Vision Makes Me Blind. This is easily removable from the wall and can be tranferred to a different space.