Eleni Koroneou Gallery

Booth N14, Hall B

Preview: Wednesday 30 November 2011, 12 - 8 pm

Exhibition: 1 - 4 December 2011

We are delighted to inform you about our participation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2011.

Both artists we are showing in the Art Nova section Eirene Efstathiou and Eftihis Patsourakis are from Greece:

Their works reveal a common interest in history, the individual and collective Memory.

Eirene Efstathiou (born 1980 in Athens, lives and works in Athens). In 2009 she was the winner of the DESTE prize, Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece.
Eirene Efstathiou uses as the basis for her work both found images - from television, films, the press, public or private archives - and also her own photographs from her own wanderings in the city and the living spaces of people familiar to her. She searches for images of thresholds between public and private space, demarcations of territory, separation barriers and unintentional sites of memory and history. She then classifies the selected images into new archives, reproduces them by painting or drawing and finally arranges them into series. Her painting technique is deeply inspired by her source material, she mimics in paint the inevitable breakdown that happens to the image as it undergoes so many transformations as a way to describe the mediations of memory and nostalgia. Efstathiou does not use the principle of the archive as a strict hierarchical taxonomy of knowledge, rather in assembling this material, she is interested in what kind of narratives can emerge from a collection of images that are variations of the same subject. In this way she attempts to open up a dialogue regarding the past, seeking to describe an informal version of the facts and to conjure a narration placed beyond the limits of a linear perception of history: a narration related to our own personal experiences.

Eftihis Patsourakis (born 1967 in Crete, lives and works in Athens). At the focal point of his multidimensional artistic practice, Eftihis Patsourakis delves into the individual and collective memory, into the relationship between identity and history and re-examines representation as a carrier of these matters, both through a net of actual social and cultural references as well as through particular reinterpretations regarding the history of art of modernism. In his work Patsourakis uses casual materials (for instance post-its, paper of burnt snipes, sheets from used photo albums) which mainly through their repetitive use, become structural elements of the image. As evident references to the aesthetics of the minimalistic object as well as the aesthetics of modern painting, these everyday small objects turn into signs when cleverly placed with an absolute sense of equitable scale. His work moves between the aesthetics of the sublime (erhaben), the mechanistic and abstract sensitivity of minimalism and a dimension of banal pop innovation.