DL Gallery presents a group exhibition titled «Just Abstraction». What is abstraction in art, and what leads artists to use it as a visual language? Eight artists are invited to answer these questions in the exhibition “Just Abstraction”. The word abstraction means literally to remove something from something else. In the visual arts, in abstract or non-representational art, this is achieved by removing the literal depiction or any representational reference.
Using the visual language—shape, colour, form, line or even the imprints of gestures—abstraction creates a composition which does not attempt to convey the accurate depiction of a visual reality. The exhibition “Just Abstraction” explores the different ways and media through which contemporary artists are led to abstraction.
The painting of Apostolos Karakatsanis represents the diffusion of light through the indistinct boundaries of chromatic fields, creating spaces and folds in the third dimension as the outcomes of a thoroughly studied painterly process. Vasso Gavaisse creates rigorously geometrical reliefs by removing or folding the surface of metal sheets to generate a play of shadows and reflections. In this way she incorporates light as one of her materials, investing the forms she moulds with a true materiality. Marianna Lourba uses her camera lens to capture forms and colours from her tours of Cycladic islands; she turns them into static architectural forms and creates primordial sculptures, asymmetrical chromatic volumes of the Aegean Sea and forms that exude a peculiar eroticism. The works of Michalis Karaiskos are products of a highly time-consuming and precise manual work which is so geometrically rigorous as to resemble digital processing. Ilias Vassilos explores the relation between space and time and produces paintings with large expanses of oil colours, while his repetitive script reveals a precise relation with time, the unit and the whole. In the works of Ioannis Lassithiotakis the notions of absence and loss take on a leading role and are conveyed by the addition and removal of colours and shapes. Works of the same dimensions, laid out so as to engage in dialogue, narrate situations of precarious equilibrium in a non-descriptive way. The works of Nikos Samaras always reference space in its pragmatic dimension; using reflection and perspective as a visual distortion he creates and interplay of in and out, light and shade and alternates between the empty and the full to re-construct a three-dimensional space that carries elements of the past and the future at the same time. The artwork titled Dark Sun (2022) marks the transition of Mario Fournaris artistic research to the trend of painting minimalism. The compositional principle of shaping the painting space is gleaned by the basic characteristics of a geometry, which, despite the strictness of its form, ultimately manages to attribute elements of a poetic truth to the act of painting itself.
DL Gallery: 74 Agiou Dimitriou & 55A Mesologgiou str, Piraeus
Opening: Saturday, 4 February 2023 at 12:00 until 17:00
Duration: 4 February to 24 June 2023
Opening hours: Thursday – Friday 12:00 – 20:00
Saturday 12:00 – 16:00
Admission to the exhibition is free.