Artist Fryni Mouzakitou’s fourth solo show

Fryni Mouzakitou was a student of painter Ilias Dekoulakos at the Athens School of Fine Arts, which she graduated in 1987. She continued her studies at the École Supérieure des Arts, in Brussels, and received an MFA in Painting from London’s Royal College of Arts in 1991. She has been an instructor at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens since 2006.

Following her last solo show, Mouzakitou produced a new body of work. Her upcoming show at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center will present works in painting that openly borrow elements from the realm of design and feature a striking palette. In these formalist, colour-oriented works that draw upon the practice of commercial art and the aesthetics of glossy magazines, the artist seems to shift toward a new visual language to create cutting-edge, topical work.

More specifically, Mouzakitou turns her attention to illustrations featured on the pages of design magazines and focuses mainly on the way chairs ‘pose’ for advertising editorials almost as substitutes for the human figure, stylizing it at the same time through their own form. They are seen to hover in spaces that are either neutral, or have a studied abstract quality, dictating contemporary lifestyles through the particular stylistic approach they invoke.

The chair, or seat, is an object identified with the human figure more than any other, at once also serving to identify that form. It denotes both the presence and absence of man. Two empty chairs in a space suggest the absence of the human bodies that might occupy them, while engaging in a sort of wordless communication, as if their static presence bespoke a silent activity that we fail to notice.

The chairs in Fryni Mouzakitou’s works seem to be activating a process by which diverse relationships may form, such as those between the natural world and interior space, nature and contemporary design; relationships that intimate the feeling of loneliness and love, or the experience of sex and conflict.

Fryni Mouzakitou (1st floor) + Maria Friberg (ground floor) | 12.05 - 06.06.2009
Opening: 12th May 2009, at 19:30
Visiting hours: Tuesday - Friday 11:00 – 20:00, Saturday 12:00 – 16:00