Animus Immortalis Est

©World Press Photo

The School of Athens (Vatican)

In the mid-1970s, Giorgos Vakirtzis created a series of works entitled "Comments-Events", where he combines stimuli from current events with influences from models of older times, such as the Renaissance or Byzantium, to express contemporary concerns. In The School of Athens No. 2, the artist creates a kind of montage, using Raphael's fresco of the Vatican School of Athens and the iconic photograph of Ian Bradshaw immortalizing 25-year-old Michael O'Brien invading Twickenham Stadium, England, naked, during the rugby match break of 20 April 1974.

All of Raphael's architectural complexity has been removed, focusing on the faces. The central figures of Plato and Aristotle have been replaced by a cluster formed between O'Brien and three police officers, which has been shifted close to the foreground occupied by figures of modern workers. The intense color gamut emphasizes modern social becoming, while highlighting the idealistic dimension of the naked central figure with outstretched arms, a symbolic representation of Christ who seems to be talking about freedom. In the background, the classical Greek world seems more distant, lost in the mists of a past whose power as a point of reference is today weakened. Philosophising has now given up its central place to acting. What concerns modern man is the oppression he endures and the need to shake off the shackles that prevent him from being free within an authoritarian environment, as the presence of police officers who are trying to suppress the young man's movements refers to the dark period of Greek dictatorship (1967-1974).

Κ.Τ.

Born in Colombia in a time of all-pervading violence, conservatism, and socio-economic inequality, Carlos Motta decided early on to focus his work on questions of politics, history, religion, diversity, identity, and gender. Through an interdisciplinary investigation that often leads to building up entire archives, Motta uses a range of media in his effort to showcase alternative narratives from the perspective of marginalised groups and minorities. The installation on exhibit consists of socio-political mottoes graffitied in the streets of 12 cities around the world, as photographed by the artist. After being engraved on black paper, the mottoes take on a monumental quality as the background light comes out of the cuts. According to the artist, such mottoes —in their function as public protest against social injustice, expression of specific political thought and ideology, or motivation to reclaim public space— give rise to questions concerning the right to free speech and the how and why of interventions into that very public space. This is also the underlying thought behind the question of the title Graffiti Cuts: Who Owns the Streets: do they belong to those who mark them in paint or to those who react against such interventions? 

A.B.

In 1923 Liubov Popova worked for the graphic design of historical revolutionary slogans, such as “Liberty. Equality. Fraternity”, as well as slogans that refered to the new social reality that was being constituted in the early 1920s. The seminal slogan of the French Revolution remained coherent and active through centuries. Popova’s slogans had a visionary character since she deeply believed in the messages they conveyed. She designed them lacking any decorative trait, and the emphasis on the content was achieved by the contrasts in scale, the highlighting of particular words in red, and the distribution of the words in non-linear order. This constructivist approach is characteristic of Popova’s graphic design, on which she worked extensively in the context of art in mass production. 

Μ.Τ.

A master in the use of etching, Rembrandt had made full use of the potential of this technique to produce rich shading with very subtle tonal gradations, while the frequent use of striking light contrasts acquires, in his biblical subject matter, a highly symbolic content.

The scene is organized around the light-bathed St. Stefanos and the upright figure behind him who, by lifting a large stone, prepares to give him an overwhelming blow on the head. The stone as a symbol of martyrdom and the hands that lift it are also illuminated, but the face of the one who throws it is shaded: what is illuminated is the martyrdom of stoning, but he who becomes an instrument to impose it is, as an inner presence, in the dark. The same goes for the other two figures on the left, one that also holds a stone and the other that bends to catch one, completing the central triangular composition. Behind them, the hodgepodge of the enraged crowd is even more immersed in the turmoil of their religious intolerance, while the raised stones look like suspended, with the direction of the raised arms suggesting that perhaps, on a purely conscious level, the ones who are truly being stoned are the persecutors themselves. On the right, a faintly sketched architectural structure reminiscent of a city wall, and some unidentified faces watching the scene of martyrdom in front of a gate, act as an artistic and conceptual tonal counterweight to the main composition.

Κ.Τ.

George Lappas is one of the most important Greek artists who played an important role in the development of contemporary art in Greece with his artistic and academic work. His multidimensional artistic research is characterized by the constant search for the three-dimensional form and its relation to space. Lappas experimented with sculpture, photography and the use of light, having as cultural references the ancient Egyptian art, the Mayan culture, the movements of modernism but also the recent political history and modern iconography. The work New Burghers, 1993, was created in relation to In Seurat’s Asnieres, 1991, when the artist began working on a series of sculptures referring to Rodin and Seurat. The human red figures in the work show middle-aged men who have an enigmatic form and refer to the famous sculpture by Auguste Rodin The Burghers of Calais.

D.V.

Grown up in the United States in a context of racist oppression, Angela Davis was, especially in the 1960s, an emblematic figure in her social struggle for black rights. Her strong activism addresses issues such as the right of all people to access education and health care, and the need to eliminate the racist intolerance of the US judiciary and penitentiary system and the violent conditions in prisons. At the same time, her deeply feminist thinking pushed her to denounce, in addition to the (institutional-practiced) racial one, another type of oppression: that of interpersonal relationships, where the attempt to impose male domination is shaped as an exercise in violence against women.

During the period '70 -'72 she was imprisoned on the charge of participating in a terrorist attack, facing the death penalty. She was released after a global campaign of leftist organizations, in which Greek intellectuals also participated. It was in that year that Tassos’s engraving was made -an artist who during the turbulent times of the German Occupation, the Civil War and the Dictatorship was always enlisted in a struggle against all forms of social oppression and deprivation of human freedom and dignity.

Tassos portrays Angela Davis as an ascetic figure with big eyes, staring with fascination the supernatural vision of a world-wide domination of the ideal of social justice. The chains on her byzantine-style hands, with long expressive fingers, are broken. The doves of peace and freedom fly out of them with open wings, ready to convey the bright message of hope for the birth of a better world.

Κ.Τ.

Santiago Sierra’s artistic work addresses the hierarchies of power and class that operate in our society. Sierra became well known for his actions in which underprivileged or marginalised individuals were hired to perform pointless tasks in exchange for money. For the work 250 cm line Tattooed on 6 paid people, Espacio Aglutinador, Havana, Cuba, December 1999, six unemployed young men from Old Havana were “hired” for $30 in exchange for being tattooed. The artist has carried out provocative actions around the world underlining the situations of labourers’ exploitation, isolation, and repression within capitalist structures. 

A.M.

The thematic representation of the mother holding her starving child in her arms is approached by Orestis Kanellis realistically, but with an expressionist treatment that highlights the element of tragedy. The carefully studied, compact complex of the two figures appearing barefoot, lying on the ground within an abstractly defined space, leads the gaze to the half-naked child suffering from privation, the focal point of the whole composition, exactly at the height of the mother's breast. In this simple, anthropocentric formulation, the expressiveness of faces and of attitudes becomes a way of penetrating behind the purely morphological elements, in an attempt to detect and depict the despair of the victims of the German Occupation (1941-1944). In a world symbolically rendered with a cool color palette, the use of angular shapes reflects the sharpness of the mother's emotional charge in the face of her inability to feed her child and the exhaustion of the latter who has surrended, awaiting death. And the despair of both in the face of extreme misery due to lack of food turns into an accusation against the deprivation of the most fundamental human right, that of life itself.

Κ.Τ.

The series of 83 etchings with the general title “Los desastres de la guerra” was created on the occasion of the invasion of Napoleon's troops in Spain and the terrible personal experiences of Goya from the bloody resistance war that followed. Yet the atrocities described are considered to be more general depictions of the cruelty of all wars, where absurd brutality of the conflicts brings about the same tragic consequences for all the warring parties.

Without melodrama and emotional outbursts, rejecting all pompous heroism, Goya focuses on the most vile, the darkest that the human soul can hide, through the sight of slaughtered people. An abhorrent sight which, however, is displayed as a spoil, since the hatred against the body that has opposed resistance is such that even the pleasure derived from torturing it without mercy is not enough. In a frenzy of brute force the corpse is desecrated and its discarded limbs are turn to an exhibit: the absolute denial, the absolute opposition, the absolute intolerance to the other’s thought and to what he represents. The disease called intolerance has been externalized on the foreign body.

Κ.Τ.

The “Black Boxes”, of the period 1961-1966, are simple commercial cartons, ready-made, cheap materials of modern society. With intense interventions, violent tearings, creases, wounding of the paper skin, with the addition of other pieces of paper elements, such as arrows that pierce the flesh of the boxes or white hands that protrude powerfully, with simple industrial colours - black, white, red, aluminum – are created environments, personal spaces, flooded with heavy memories and feelings. It is an attempt by Daniel to record "the ten year-tragedy we lived in our country", as he says referring to the civil war.

L.Τ.

In the late 1960s the Greek art scene witnesses the emergence of a critical kind of representational painting with its focus on the social function of the artwork in a contemporary mass culture of commercialisation that was spreading in Greece. This tendency found its most systematic expression in the activities of the “New Greek Realists” (1971–1973), a group comprising Yannis Valavanidis, Cleopatra Dinga, Kyriakos Katzourakis, Chronis Botsoglou, and Jannis Psychopedis. One of the outstanding works of “critical realism” is Frieze (1972), a modular work by Chronis Botsoglou included in the exhibition Five Greek Realists at the Contemporary Art Workshop of the Goethe Institute in Athens. The eighteen panels of Frieze make up a series of episodes reminiscent of cinematic stills and illustrated stories. Frieze comes out as a contradictory portrait of a fragmented contemporary reality through a mixture of personal and collective narratives that emerge in the 1970s: the world of spectacle, the police state, football, the Press, consumerism, and everyday violence are intertwined with an autobiographical account. The artist stands critically against the dominant ideology of mass culture and its effect on shaping individual and collective identities, at the same time exploring the potential role of painting in the contemporary visual culture.

T.P.

The series And regarding the remembrance of evils… 1967–1997 is to Dimosthenis Kokkinidis, an artist with an intense social and political discourse, a spontaneous personal record of the dramatic events of the early days of the dictatorial regime of 1967. Starting from the photos of uniformed army officers that fill contemporary newspapers, in May 1967 the artist starts to paint the “protagonists” on some packaging cardboard he had found lying forgotten in his studio. The heavily distorted, caricature-like figures are rendered either in an abstract form without clear features and details or in an intensely expressionistic idiom. The severe, almost suffocating painterly space, the choice and use of colour, and the eloquent symbolisms dominate these works and graphically convey the feeling of lost freedom, the anxiety about the future, and the loathing for those responsible for the country’s tribulations. Most of the series was completed by December 1967, but the works remained hidden in the artist’s studios. Some of them were exhibited thirty years later, in 1997, at the Astra Gallery under the title …And regarding the remembrance of evils… 1967–1997.

E.G.

Drawing with charcoal, pencil, chalk and watercolor and archival photographs with drawing interventions are the mediums that she engages with.

She started using photography in 2000 with works in which the concealment of the body and face through objects is basic and characteristic. She continued to photograph hidden women’s bodies throughout 2002 while from 2005 till today drawing prevails with emphasis on the children’s world and especially that of little girls. All sorts of distortion and the hiding of the characteristics are becoming her trademark in her drawings but also in her “painted” photographs.

With an overtly surreal tone, overstressing elements, and with creepy actions and details, like scenes from a thriller movie, she describes the children’s world and the child psychology as a series of nightmares and tortures, sometimes descriptively and other times simpler. A world which is as private as a home or a child’s room and as public as a school. In many cases the absence of an adult figure is so intense, but when he exists, he’s only there to transmit its own psychopathology to the child and thus torment it.

In the overall of her visual creation, Calbari reconstructs or creates from the beginning disturbing images of violence, psychological and physical, a violence that is exercised upon children either from other children, through seemingly innocent group games, or from adult authority figures. Her works usually look like images the way an adult would have seen and interpreted them, through the pathology of modern society, having already abstracted every bit of innocence and purity from his mind and experience.

Τ.Μ.

Apartis created this relief column in response to an order for a monument to the Scouts of Smyrna who were tortured during the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The monument, however, was not approved by the commissioners because it depicted a naked male figure.

In 1983 the bas-relief, embedded in the replica of an iron cell door, was used to erect a monument to the patriots who were tortured during the Occupation in Gestapo detention centers. It was placed at the entrance of the ASTIR Insurance Company building, at 6 Merlin Street, where the detention centers were located and remains in this position until today.

Apartis, who intended to make a work-symbol of all the young people who sacrificed themselves for an ideal, renders the form without personalised characteristics and focusing on the essence of the subject. The young man is depicted naked, with his body in frontal position and his head in profile, leaning towards his shoulder. This element is found in works by Michelangelo, Rodin and Bourdelle and signifies inner agony and death. The position of the body, the shape of the column, and the inscription at the base, refer, on the other hand, to the ancient tombstones, while the posture of the body to the Cyclist (1907) by Aristide Maillol, who, in several cases, inspired Apartis, especially until 1930.

Τ.G.

Deeply anthropocentric, full of human presence, but at the same time of human loneliness, the paintings of Apostolos Georgiou leave the viewer alone but completely free to interpret the depicted protagonists of his works - usually anonymous, without clear gender, nationality and intentions. 

The cold-blooded assassination on October 9, 1967, of the Argentine revolutionary, ex-leader of the Cuban Guerillas to aid Fidel Castro against the then dictatorial regime, shocked much of the world, as his name was already synonymous with his struggles in favour of the oppressed.

The grieving by the news of this death is depicted by the engraver Tassos through the form of the dead Che who has fallen from the bullets of the Bolivian army. The posture and the way the half-naked exhausted body, wrapped only with a piece of cloth around the pelvis and with obvious signs of agony and fatigue rendered on the face, effortlessly refer to the depositioned body of the crucified Christ. A martyrdom sacrifice, which yet contains the hopeful message that the ideals that inspired and guided Che Guevara in his short life cannot be killed. On the contrary, the dead body conceals the symbolic promise of their immortality, as in the people’s memory the face of the living fighter has been elevated to a universal symbol of combating for social justice.

Κ.Τ.

Ilias Papailiakis, an artist with a distinctive visual idiom, often employs the painted image as a symbol. In Portrait of P.P. Pasolini he starts from the death of the great intellectual and artist to talk about the freedom of expression and self-determination and the courage to defend one’s views. The work and the ideas of Pasolini, a multifaceted and contradictory personality, marked the world cinema and Europe’s intellectual realm. Anti-fascist, Marxist, and homosexual, he was seen as provocative and extreme and was frequently censured. He was brutally murdered in 1975, shortly after completing his famous and controversial film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, in which he explored the nature of fascism. His death was seen by many as a political assassination, but confessed to by Pino Pelosi, a 17-year-old male prostitute. Thirty years later Pelosi retracted his confession, saying it had been made under threat against his life and family. The crime-scene photos of Pasolini, as they were released by the Italian police and published in contemporary newspapers, triggered the creation of the work which Papailiakis himself describes as a tribute to a personal hero.

E.G.

The dance of Zalongo was created in the early 1950s and is a study for the large white stone monument erected in 1961 in Zalongo to commemorate the heroic act of the women of Souli. The study and the construction of the monument were done in collaboration with the architect Patroclos Karantinos and is one of the many works of Zongolopoulos in the field of architecture, an outcome of the great experience he had gained during his long service in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Byzantine Restoration of the Ministry of Education.

The project’s model, which was submitted in 1953 in the competition for the construction of the monument, won the second prize. Another model, which was also made in collaboration with P. Karantinos and included a main monument in the form of an architectural construction and a secondary smaller one in the form of Souliotissa, had won the first prize.

The composition aimed at highlighting the monument so that it will be visible from afar, and harmonising it with the wild and imposing landscape. Its outline forms a triangle that includes four women holding hands. Rendered with exceptional austerity, they gradually shrink in size and become more and more stylised, to reach, in the last one, a compact volume with a completely abstract form. This successive development of the figures, which rise like supernatural visions, gives rhythm and grandeur to the work, just as the artist sought, while at the same time combining harmoniously emptiness and completeness, an element that will particularly preoccupy Zongolopoulos in his later works.

Τ.G.

Vasso Katraki in the characteristic, elongated, archetypal forms of her compositions -full of abstraction and of a deeply processed simplification of their form- develops the same vision and explores the same aesthetic issues, shapes an entire universe of human shapes and their vital relationship with the world, creating a message for an alternative way of life and social protest that focuses on the fate of humans, perfectly balancing her passion and ascension through the evocative contrast of black and white. [...]
In Platyteres series, the female face -mother and Virgin Mary at the same time- appears in its fullness; their round shapes refer to the sources of life -the Earth and the Sun-, the hands give hierarchical grandeur, the lyricism coexists with the primordial memories and the metaphysical content.

During the 1990s, Chronis Botsoglou meditated on the theme of Nekya. The term is taken from the 11th rhapsody of the Odyssey, where Homer describes the descent of Odysseus to Hades and his encounter with the shadows of dead relatives of his. The strongly existential mood that characterizes the entire work of the artist is focused, in the work of this period, on the investigation of issues related to memory, decay, and death.

In the painted part of the work, the naked male figure emerges through a dark metaphysical background, and is abstractly expressed for the most part as it seems to dissolve into its own inner light. At the same time, it appears as projected in the physical, three-dimensional space, reflected on a plasterboard fallen down and broken into pieces. The posture of the relief body is different from that of its mental imprint/counterpart and, in combination with the shape of the cross formed by the four joined plates, it refers to the idea of a martyr's death. Yet the feet of the painted figure still retain their materiality, suggesting the connection of the fallen form with a transcendental world. What has fallen is just a shell. The inner spiritual being, liberated, continues to live. Even if its material vehicle is fragmented, its internal light continues to burn.

Κ.Τ.

In the 1930s, and certainly under the conscious or unconscious influence of the preachings of this generation, Parthenis’s style turned to a straight angular type, which often seems to be supported by design instruments such as canon and diabetes. There is also a return to the values of Byzantine art: the cool spring colors of the previous period are now being replaced by the Byzantine scale, with earthy, brown, gray, and dark blue. The line remains light, almost not made by hand, leaving the canvas visible and changing the figures into dreamy, imaginary projections on the surface of the painting.

The monumental composition, one of the leading works of modern Greek art, deifies the first martyr of the Greek Revolution, Athanasios Diakos, who died a martyr's death near the Alamana bridge on April 24, 1821. The painter identifies the resurrection and ascension of the hero with the Resurrection of Christ. On the left, a haloed figure, an Angel or one of the myrrh-bearers, discovers with surprise the empty tomb of the risen hero. In the middle another angel with helmet, spear and shield, like a Christian Athena, is present at the miracle. Athanasios Diakos, dressed in an ancient tunic, rises to the sky, where musical angels are waiting for him, just like in Greco's paintings, and others who bring laurel wreaths to crown him. A daughter, taken as if from the Botticelli’s Spring, sprinkles the hero with the flowers she bears in her apron. Next to her, an ancient tall censer burns incense. The painting elevates the Greek Revolution to the realm of the ideal world of ideas.

Μ.L.P.

A human-centered sculptor, faithful to representation, but with a strong tendency towards stylisation and abstraction, Memos Makris studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, attended classes in Paris and in 1950 settled in Hungary. Busts, female figures and nudes, as well as monuments for public spaces compose his work, in which he draws elements from archaic art, his French apprenticeship and abstract-expressionist models.

In 1977, in honor of the victims of the Polytechnic School in 1973, he created an oversize head, a copy of which was placed in wrought copper in 1979 in the courtyard of the National Technical University of Athens. Another copy of the work belongs to the National Gallery of Hungary, while the plaster model is kept in the National Gallery.

Τ.G.

As from the late 1950s, Vlassis Caniaris, one of the most important artists in Greek post-war art, turned towards a “sociology of the real”, exploring the function of the work of art as social testimony. Starting off with the intention to “re-create the image as well as the impression of the walls of occupied Athens”, Vlassis Caniaris began the series of works entitled Homage to the Walls of Athens 1941–19… in 1959. The works were produced through a successive gestural treatment of thick layers of plaster, cloth, paper, palimpsests, engravings, destructions and erasures, with the objective to condense and preserve the memory of the urban public space as it had been shaped during one of the most dramatic periods of Greek history. As part of this process, Caniaris appropriated and transcribed —using the colour red— fragments of the public discourse on resistance and liberation struggle, as these appeared in the form of slogans on the walls of Athens during the German occupation, without, however, avoiding making reference to his post-Civil War times. The letter E, which can be made out in the work, may stand for the first letter of resistance groups such as EAM (National Liberation Front), EPON (United Pan-Hellenic Organization of Youth), and ELAS (The Greek People’s Liberation Army) or it could simply stand for Eleftheria (Freedom).

In Andrea Bowers’ universe, the purpose of art is not merely aesthetic; for her, art is a means for the promotion of her political agenda, a form of social activism through which she becomes able to speak out about the socio-political issues that concern her. One of her common practices is what could be called the “humanization” of the problems she deals with. Out of the anonymous masses, Bowers chooses to focus her attention on figures of activists and victims, thus highlighting the human dimension of ideological or political conflicts. Her work No Olvidado (Not Forgotten), 2010, consists of drawings that are monumental in scale. In these, Bowers inscribes the names of the people who died trying to cross the Mexican-American border. The list of names is covered with barbed wire. Bowers drew and printed both the names and the pattern of the barbed wire on vinyl. Then, she placed the vinyl on white paper, applied graphite on the entire surface and removed the vinyl, leaving the white imprint of the pattern on the paper. The choice of fragile and inexpensive materials is intentional in that it echoes the way in which the establishment views the lives of all those who died on the other side of the border trying to find better life: vulnerable lives; lives that do not matter. Bower’s work is as timely as ever, especially considering the Republicans’ bigoted rhetoric and Trump’s announcements on the US intention to build a wall along the Mexican border —announcements that alert us to the consequences of the US immigration policy. No Olvidado acts as a memorial in honour of the invisible victims. Unlike most memorials, this one will include an ever-incomplete list, and will remain so ad infinitum, no matter how many names are added.

A.M.

The painting "The Triumphs of Caesar", by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna, consists of a sequence of nine oversized paintings depicting one of the triumphant processions with which Julius Caesar marked in the most emblematic way the sealing of a victorious campaign on his return to Rome.

In the engraving entitled Soldiers Carrying Trophies, a representation of the sixth in a row from the Mantegna circle, the seizure of cultural heritage amounts to a symbol of erasing the identity of the Other, as the overlord has appropriated by force whatever most beautiful and precious the opponent has produced in his need to decorate his space or to express himself ritually. The material culture that one builds around himself as his own extension, and through which he exists symbolically as an individual and a collective identity, is taken away from him, inflicting the last and incurable blow after the removal of one's personal life and freedom. And the empty armor that is ostentatiously carried by the Roman soldiers along with its helmet, becomes semantically a cymbal silent, emptied of the presence of its rightful owner. Bending over under the weight of defeat and walking with difficulty leaning on a stick, he has now found himself in the situation of a slave who, uprooted from his homeland, is forced to a humiliating dragging behind those who proudly carry the weight of his own plundered treasures, his own stolen culture.

Κ.Τ.

TPsychopedis’ work is distinguished by its exploratory and always contemporary style, and its references to the general problems of modern society.

The artist’s keen critical perception of society is evident even in his early work from the 1970’s. He was a founding member of the New Greek Realists Group and participated in exhibitions, showing works with combining elements of popular magazine covers, consumer products, the events of the dictatorship, the struggles of the left, the symbols of women’s liberation, images of power.

In 1997, Psychopedis presented the exhibition Face-Control at the Zoumboulakis Gallery in Athens, completing the trilogy which began with the series Hands in 1993 and continued with the works Lower Limbs in 1996.

In the work, History Lesson –The Lower Limbs (1996) working within the Critical Realism tradition, the artist reorganizes the image of reality in order to set in motion a sequence of conceptual and philosophical procedures. His preoccupation with social instability, consumption, bad taste and indifference are presented in these works through the use of materials like wood, fabric, the documentary photography, printed canvases and the amputated limbs of ancient Greek statues. The element of dismantling, fragmentation and reconstruction, as well as the obvious suffering of each individual component of the work raise questions concerning the essential nature, the present and future of the state of art.

K.S.

TA sculptor with ancestry from Pergamon in Asia Minor, Vassos Kapandais was born in Mytilene. He later moved with his family to Athens, but lived among refugees, people who carried the memories of their lost homeland. With these memories he grew up, traveled many times to "Mother Asia Minor", as he called it, and focused his work on the land of Ionia: "I wanted to do such a sculpture, like an old Ion in modern times. A sculpture whose roots are deep in the Greek soils of our land, a sculpture as if I did it in Ionia".

From this desire was born The Asia Minor Ma, a work with a strong emotional charge. Ma, daughter of the sun and personification of the truth in Egypt, war and lunar deity of the peoples of Cappadocia and Pontus, whom Strabo associates with the goddess Artemis, while in Lydia and Caria she was identified with Rhea-Kyveli, mother of gods, who lends its name to the Earth, the mother of all, in Aeschylus' Iketides. This name with multiple interpretations is chosen by Kapandais for his composition. The fragmentary female figure, with the dramatic, as if from an ancient theater mask expression, and the archaic headdress which intensifies her drama, static, without arms and with amputated legs, is the personification of his own mutilated paternal land.

Τ.G.

TA pioneer of abstraction, Lazaros Lameras created, among other things, fantastic plant-like ensembles, using stone, iron and other materials, inspired by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki disasters. In these works, in which he introduced the movement, the lower part, referring to the trunk, ends up in vertical, thorny, phytomorphic, flexible patterns, with plates that extend in space and, with the blowing of the air, create various sounds.

In a letter to Tonis Spiteris, on March 30, 1960, Lameras refers to two similar works, explaining the logic of construction and their symbolism: In my new works you will see a moving axis and various shapes that will remind you of a very high thorn, this was found one day in front of me and of Tombros on a mountain of Epirus […] / The work number 1, is for a lake, the lower part of the composition is made of coloured marble and the other elements that come out of the marble are made of bronze and hard aluminum. The whole composition moves with the air and the various plates make sounds. The title is “‘life goes on”. / The [work] number 2, this work is made of black metal, the symbolism of the work is the same that out of the ruins always comes a flower, such as e.g. if we take the catastrophe that took place in Nagasaki and through the great heat, a strange flower came out of the asphalt. The title is “around a vertical axis”.

Τ.G.

TAthena Taha's models for the monuments of genocide constitute a universal virtual place of a personal journey that claims the right to memory through physical experience. They illustrate the visual perception of contemporary public artworks of commemorative character that do not glorify personalities or events, but attacks of brutal violence by pointing out the barbarity and catastrophic destruction suffered by different ethnic, religious and racial groups of the world population, with respect for the wounded. She seeks to define public sculpture through the human presence, either as the subject or as the object of the memorial process. She is not interested in the official version of history, but in the human suffering stories caused by tragic loss, oblivion, concealment and selfish remembrance that serve political expediencies and power relations.

S.T.