Enet.gr
Visual Arts
Responsible: MARIA ADAMOPOULOU m.adamopulu@gmail.com /9
Visual painkillers
“RELIGION-Metaphysics”, “Nature”, and “Science-Chemistry” are the spaces on which Peggy Kliafa built her new work. The exhibition with the title “Pharmakon”, which is presented at the Kappatos Gallery, in Monastiraki, Athens, consists of works produced from 2008 to date. Paintings, murals, reliefs, mosaics, installations and video are evolved through three sections, which illustrate “the history of therapeutics as a palimpsest of metaphysics, nature and science.”
The prevailing, distinctive feature is the choice and persistence in the material of her works, which is none other than pills or medicine wrapping, packaging, pill blisters and, finally, foil from pill wrappers.
This is a reductive tracing of the evolution of the human view on the healing of soul and body. The combination and juxtaposition of pills – painkillers, antibiotics, psychotropic drugs – reveals the artist’s suggestive allusions as to the content and effect of their use.
Using pills or blisters as her building block, she composes impressive images of metal walls, stained-glass images from European cathedrals, tapestries, lace, mosaics. A human sculpture made of effervescent tablets can be seen on video during the process of being dissolved in water.
Pills, in different colours and shapes, and their packaging, develop organized and symmetrical geometric patterns of impeccable execution, establishing a trompe l’oeil of multiple significations and associations.
Her latest works, from 2013, “drawing their iconographic positioning as well as their morphological idiom from biology, specifically from enlarged bacterial growth under the microscope, they result in new shapes and forms, new art propositions.
Exhibition open until January 11, 2014
H.K. Tegopoulos Publications S.A.
