Alexandra Athanassiades — Dutko / Quai Voltaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 14 → April 20, 2024

Dutko Gallery is pleased to present, from March 14 to April 20th 2024, an exhibition by Greek artist Alexandra Athanassiades. Bringing together a corpus of major works dating from the 1980s to her most recent creations, this will be the artist’s first solo show at the gallery since 2012. This unprecedented group of sculptures will be an opportunity to explore the three central themes of her work: the Armor, the Horse and the Torso.

Alexandra Athanassiades shapes the initially resistant material until it bends to her will. Talking about her artistic process, Alexandra Athanassiades evokes the image of a horse trainer: “There are two sides to me. The side that bows its head and agrees to do what’s expected of me, and the other side that disobeys and doesn’t bend to what’s expected of me”.

Drawing on her country’s rich artistic heritage, evoking both the influences of Greek antiquity and more recent artistic movements such as cubism, surrealism and abstraction, Alexandra Athanassiades nevertheless rejects the classical ideal of beauty, preferring the rough, imperfect surfaces of wood or bronze, creating a dialogue between past and present, tradition and innovation.

Alexandra Athanassiades works with a wide variety of materials, from wood to paper, iron to bronze. She also has a passion for transforming elements aged by time, such as pieces of driftwood, recycled paper or rusty pieces of iron picked up here and there. Each sculpture and drawing carries an intense evocative power. The interplay of volumes, the empty/full ratios and the finesse of the shadows created contribute to the great elegance of her works, and invite us to reflect on time past, but also on time to come.