Opening: Thursday, September 11th 2025
Exhibition duration: 11 September–4 October 2025
Location: Zoumboulakis Galleries, 20 Kolonaki Square, Athens, Greece
Curator: Dr. Sozita Goudouna
The Catalogue’s text by the curator Dr. Sozita Goudouna:
The grid is the silent dictator of modernity. It structures our cities, our screens, and even our medicine cabinets. From the relentless right angles of Manhattan’s skyline to the clinical precision of pharmaceutical packaging, the grid imposes an illusion of order upon the chaos of life. Yet, beneath its rational veneer lies a paradox—it both sustains and suffocates, heals, and controls.
The Grid as a Modernist Paradox
In her solo exhibition, Healing the Grid, Peggy Kliafa’s work confronts this duality, drawing upon the ancient ziggurat as a counter-symbol to the flat, oppressive logic of the modern grid.
The artist interrogates the intersections of modernist urban structures, biomedical aesthetics, and visual art, probing how the rigid geometries of urban planning resonate with the invisible architectures of human biology. Drawing from the legacy of the grid—a symbol of rational order in modernist architecture and art—Kliafa reconfigures its cold precision into a living, pulsating network that mirrors cellular formations, vascular systems, and the sterile yet intimate spaces of medical imaging.
This exhibition does not merely present an aesthetic contrast between two forms (the rigid grid and the ascending ziggurat) but stages a philosophical and historical confrontation. The ziggurat, a sacred structure from Mesopotamia represents a different way of understanding space, health, and society—one that was holistic, stratified, and spiritually engaged. Meanwhile, the modernist grid, with its cold efficiency, reflects our contemporary condition: a world where systemic health crises—pollution, urban alienation, mental health epidemics—are met not with structural change but with pills, quick fixes that mask rather than mend.
Kliafa’s work, deeply engaged with the intersections of art and medicine, interrogates this condition. Her art pieces and installations dissolve the rigid grid into aesthetic, and pulsating forms, suggesting that true healing requires not more control, but a reconfiguration—an ascent, like the ziggurat’s tiers, toward a more integrated, spiritual, and aesthetic way of being.
While modernist abstraction often sought purity and flatness (Mondrian’s rigid compositions), Kliafa’s art pieces are dense, layered, alive. Her grids are not static but dynamic, resembling biological membranes, neural networks, or even aerial views of urban sprawl. This fluidity suggests that healing cannot be imposed from above (like a gridded prescription) but must emerge from within, through a renegotiation of boundaries.
Healing the Grid is not a nostalgic return to antiquity but a provocation: what if we stopped trying to “fix” the grid and instead transcended it? The ziggurat offers an alternative logic—one of spirituality, accumulation, integration, and ascent.
The ziggurat was more than an architectural form—it was a cosmological diagram. In ancient Mesopotamia, these stepped temples were seen as bridges between earth and heaven, places where the human and the divine could commune. Unlike the grid, which enforces a uniform, horizontal logic, the ziggurat ascends, layer by layer, toward transcendence. The ziggurat was not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader, ancient understanding of space as sacred, stratified, and alive.
By contrast, the modernist grid—epitomized by the Cartesian coordinate system and Le Corbusier’s urban plans—flattens existence into measurable, controllable units. It is no coincidence that the same gridded logic underpins both our cities and our medicine: both reduce complex, living systems into standardized, interchangeable parts.
Kliafa’s Oeuvre: Dissolving the Grid, Reclaiming the Body
Jacques Derrida, in his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, resurrected the ancient Greek concept of the pharmakon —a word that means both “remedy” and “poison.” This duality is at the heart of modern medicine, where pills function as both salvation and suppression.
Our era is defined by a pharmaceutical dependency that mirrors the grid’s logic: instead of addressing the root causes of illness—environmental degradation, alienating labor conditions, social fragmentation—we are given chemical correctives. Antidepressants for despair induced by late capitalism, statins for hearts burdened by processed diets, anxiolytics for minds strained by hyper-connectivity. The grid, in this sense, is not just an architectural principle but a metabolic one—a system that manages symptoms while ignoring the disease.
Kliafa’s work, as explored in the Healing the Grid exhibition, visualizes this tension. Her pieces are palimpsests of geometric rigidity and organic disintegration, where the strict lines of the grid dissolve into cellular, almost viral, patterns. The pills that appear in her compositions are not lifeless objects but ambiguous entities—simultaneously curative and corrosive.
Kliafa’s current work suggests that the crises of our time—pharmaceutical dependency, mental health epidemics, environmental collapse, —cannot be solved within the grid’s rigid framework. We might require a new paradigm, one that, like the ziggurat, acknowledges complexity, embraces stratification, and ascends toward something greater and communal. In the end, this exhibition is not just about art or architecture—it is about the endurance and survival of human and non-human species. Has the grid failed us? Is it time to climb?
Healing the Grid does not propose a return to some unbroken ideal but rather a reconfiguration—an acknowledgment that the fractures in our systems are where new possibilities emerge. Kliafa’s art, with its rhythmic disruptions of the grid, suggests that healing is not about erasing scars but integrating them into a new order, much like the ziggurat’s layered ascent. In a society increasingly dependent on the gridded logic of pills, screens, and urban planning, her work offers a vital counterpoint: a vision of healing that embraces complexity, ambiguity, and transcendence.
The exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between the imposed order of the city grid and the organic yet algorithmic logic of the body. Kliafa’s art pieces and installations evoke the clinical gaze of microscopy and radiology, transposing the aesthetics of biomedicine and microscopic pathologies onto the rigid frameworks of urban blueprints. Here, the modernist grid—once a symbol of industrial progress—becomes a scaffold for biological vulnerability, a mesh where the body and the metropolis intersect.
Kliafa layers the hard edges of architectural schematics with fluid, almost viral, organic forms, suggesting that the body itself is a contested urban site. Her use of sterile palettes— clinical objects, pills—invokes the aesthetics of medical laboratories, while her disruptions of geometric perfection with biomorphic intrusions question the stability of both urban and corporeal structures.
The exhibition also engages with medical visualization, framing the grid not just as a formal device but as a metaphor for the systems that seek to measure, categorize, and control life. By juxtaposing the sterile logic of urban planning with the chaotic beauty of biological systems, Kliafa exposes the tensions between rationality and entropy, between the engineered and the evolved.
Off The Grid
In parallel, the artist exposes the tensions behind the notion of the “off the grid” that resonates as a metaphor for resistance and emancipation from the pervasive structures she explores. “Off the Grid” signifies a shift away from the calculated, monitored, and compartmentalized spaces of modernity towards alternative modes of being that prioritize privacy, spontaneity, and organic connection. For Kliafa, “off the grid” embodies a potential rupture—an intentional retreat from the omnipresent control of systemic architectures—opening space for personal and collective healing beyond the constraints of linear, homogenizing frameworks. It invites us to consider how communities and individuals might cultivate new forms of connection that transcend the mapped, surveilled territories of urban and biological grids, embracing instead the unpredictable, chaotic flux of life that defies categorization and standardization.
Moreover, “off the grid” challenges the notion of autonomy within the dominant systems of control, urging a reimagining of agency grounded in relationality and layered complexity. By stepping off the grid, one can reclaim quiet spaces of resilience—hidden, unmonitored zones where healing can occur without the insidious overlay of systemic oversight. This detachment does not mean disconnection but a conscious departure from the imposed order, allowing space for spontaneous processes of regeneration, community-building, and spiritual ascent. It is an act of resistance that aligns with the ziggurat’s layered ascent—an acknowledgment that true healing often involves moving beyond the limits of all-encompassing systems to find refuge in the uncharted, layered territories of the self and collective consciousness.
Thus, Healing the Grid is not merely an aesthetic inquiry but a critical reflection on how modernity’s architectural and artistic ideals are inscribed onto the flesh—both the body politic and the physical body. In Kliafa’s vision, the grid is no longer just a structure; it is a living, breathing entity, a map of both the city and the self.
Dr. Sozita Goudouna
Opening: Thursday, September 22 2016
Exhibition duration: 15.09– 14.10.2016
Location: Lola Nikolaou Gallery Thessaloniki, Greece
Curator: Thalea Stefanidou
Placebo is a medicine prescribed for the psychological benefit rather than for any physiological effect.
With Placebo, Peggy Kliafa’s latest exhibition at Lola Nikolaou art gallery in September 2016, the artist continues to explore medicinal themes and the therapeutic nature of illusionism in art.
I would add to these a disjunctive personal interpretation: “Placebo, or an ‘artist’s’ melancholy invention.” Just like the mind creates “healing” poems by combining loans sourced from literally everywhere, so does an artist collect materials by creatively blending media, assemblage and handicraft, whose distinctive blend results in the kind of intellectual product that soothes the mind – by invention! In this light, Kliafa’s interest focuses on the foundations of the Western perception of natural or scientific “wonders”, as well as intellectual ones, as is the case in all arts.
Stained glass, tapestries, rosettes, lace, latches, reliefs, chandeliers, mosaics, assemblages and framed “portraits” of pills – all made of used blister packaging, or emptied transparent capsules and pills, intact and untouched, often in confectioner sachets. Special care and attention is evident in the selection and classification of this material. Elements of heretical architecture, Peggy Kliafa’s constructions claim their stake on three-dimensional space by recreating what could be construed as memories of places of worship and mystical rituals.
The construction process highlights a variety of visual motifs, and the variegated treatment of the readymade materials results in a kind of embroidery on flat surfaces or stylised cumulates in the round. This is a craftsman’s condition in the greater scheme of inventive artistic practices, where high-accuracy gestures enable works almost not made by human hand.
Smart re-dis-positioning of the selected material, collages of “stolen”, now empty medicine packages, whirling, hybridised, meandering, the spyres and rosettes, the metaphorical depictions of familiar symbols and shapes, all serve as board-game pieces that make for a new game each time, generating a bewildering universe.
Everything, from material selection to end result, attests to a patient labour of love, a kind of meditation, from which springs forth the artist’s intimate life experience. The eloquent stillness of Peggy Kliafa’s works unequivocally fosters a mood of concentration, paradoxical discreetness and profundity – further intensified by her use of timeless symbols of the sacred.
Although the materials used by Peggy Kliafa in her work allude to the power of science to heal through medication, the exhibition title hints at the possibility of self-delusion. The potential of “placebo” is purely imaginary, just as the idiom of art is. This, then, is an allegory of healing and its effectiveness, as well as a parody by a modern-day Faust, who, having discovered the elixir of immortality, whiles away the time meticulously hand-crafting works of art. In this respect, Peggy Kliafa’s studio is populated by aesthetic “alchemical preparations of art” – illusionistic remedies and potions for “disease”. Her creative output testifies to the fact that all manifestation of creativity is a near-religious experience, a mind-expanding enhancement of our perceptive ability with an eye to healing…
Thalea Stefanidou
Art Historian/Critic, Curator
English translation: Dimitris Saltabassis
Opening: Thursday, November 28th 2013
Exhibition duration: November 28th 2013 – February 5th 2014
Location: Kappatos Gallery, Athens, Greece
Curator: Dr. Lina Tsikouta-Deimezi
…Socrates shows that the whole of the body can only be cured at the source – the soul – of all its goods and evils. “…where temperance comes and stays, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body”. And the discussion turns to essence of temperance, the best pharmakon, the capital cure.
This pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philter, which acts like both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be – alternately or simultaneously – beneficent or maleficent.
(PLATO’S PHARMACY)
DISSEMINATION
Jacques Derrida
THE ATHLONE PRESS, LONDON
Common material – perfect form – prevalence of the idea – enjoyment of the aesthetic result: the reflection of a conceptual poetic image
“I’m only saying that art is an illusion”
Marcel Duchamp
“This is not an era of finished works. It is an era of fragments.”
Marcel Duchamp
There are many fitting statements by important contemporary artists for the layered quality of the artistic output of Peggy Kliafa (1967). The French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the most disruptive artist of the 20th century said that, “Art is an illusion” and “It is an era of fragments” – both apply to both the form and the content of the Greek artist’s work. A fitting maxim is also that by Damien Hirst (1965) that “Art is like medicine. It can heal” that the British artist made in the context of his exhibition Modern Medicine in 1990, which marked the beginning of the rise of Young British Art.
In Peggy Kliafa’s art, the idea, the conceptual framework is dominant, with many connotations, simple readings and eloquent resonances. In her first solo exhibition at Kappatos Art Gallery she displays her creative output from 2008 to 2013, arranged in three sections, her years at the Athens School of Fine Arts, her graduation in 2011-2012, and the latest evolution of her work. She graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts, 3rd Painting Workshop, directed by professor Marios Spiliopoulos, where she was also taught by professors Zafos Xagoraris and Pantelis Handris, having selected Sculpture as her main focus under professor Nikos Tranos.
The title, Pharmakon, simply and clearly encapsulates the context of her creativity with respect to the development of the idea, the medium and the base material, the aesthetic completion of her work. And this is because with each component the artist evokes and alludes to Medicine, Treatment, and Healing of body or soul.
The uniqueness of her art is that she has selected as a basic, key element of her work the pill, or the blister, the medical packaging itself. Based on the pill or blister as her building block, she composes images of metal walls, stained-glass images from European cathedrals, wallpapers, lace, mosaics. Pills in different colours and shapes, and packaging, sometimes intact and sometimes used, opened, wrinkled, are arranged in geometric patterns. This new medium may be said to take the place of the brush stroke, colour, pencil, metal, glass, tessera, yarn. The strict structure, total symmetry, flawless execution, all contribute to the effect of a hallucinatory image, with a proliferation of connotations and associations.
The three sections, “Religion-Metaphysics”, “Nature”, and “Science –Chemistry”, reflect the artist’s scientific and historical research on the treatment of human disease, from primitive societies to the present day, from metaphysics and religion, the use of natural resources and herbs, and later the development of science and chemistry in the effort to heal the human soul and body. According to the artist the three sections of her work on display illustrate “the history of therapeutics as a palimpsest of metaphysics, nature and science.”
The first section, “Religion-Metaphysics”, includes works such as Vitraux and Omphalio. Harking back to European cathedrals, the Vitraux are three large-scale works that comprise the installation Remedy or Poison. The two upright works are a faithful reproduction of stained-glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral; the central Rosette comes from the Durham Cathedral. The artist believes that, “Stained-glass windows are a window to the world, in the same sense that a medicine is also a window to the world, both as a way out of illness and pain, and as worldview.” She goes on to provide a hermeneutic, psychoanalytical aspect, however: “Taking or avoiding certain medications, and the types of medication each of us takes are clear indications of our attitude to life itself.”
Omphalio, a geometric mosaic in white, yellow, red, green, and orange colours, reproduces the mosaic floor of the Sagmata Monastery in Boeotia, with squares, circles, spirals, and foliage; according to the artist, this could be symbolic of the “centre of the world”.
The second section, “Nature”, includes works such as a simple wallpaper, with the ambiguous, ironic title Nature is Innocent, which depicts images of red poppies – the opium plant – and green marijuana leaves, printed on medicine leaflets. A new work, Tree, made of effervescent tablets, is in the same section.
The third and final section, “Science – Chemistry”, comprises works made in a variety of media – paintings, sculptures, videos, reliefs, installations – including some of the artist’s oldest paintings, as well as her latest production of 2013. “Portraits of pills” depict pills as individual personalities, as celebrities, including pills of various properties and uses – antibiotics, painkillers, anti-inflammatory, or psychotropic drugs. A mosaic of pills evokes “White Lace”. The artist plays with the concepts, properties, and reception of medication and wonders: “White lace symbolizes romance, purity; it is associated with joyful events in our lives. Does this apply to medication?”
A unique work in this section is a white sculpture of a sketchily rendered human figure made of effervescent tablets; it is juxtaposed with a video playing simultaneously, dealing with the ephemeral existence of a tablet and the process of dissolving in water, which is a matter of only a few seconds.
In terms of their form, these works impress, whether they follow a process of faithful representation or develop in planes of austere surfaces, in which a simple, repetitive base pattern dominates. Thus, the Vitraux impress and mislead with the perfection of their figurative accuracy, despite the sharp contrast and challenge posed by the medium, used silver packets of pills. Works such as Armory, a huge silver wall made of the same “discontinuous” materials, astound with the power of their minimalism and the intense austerity of their conceptual potential. The work, while taking into consideration the major differences, brings to mind an environment by Jason Molfessis (1925-2009), Iron Corridor, dating from 1990 and made of heavy materials (polyester and iron), a relevant work as it, too, focuses on the power of the minimal and the beauty of the material. Sparse works, simple assemblages, creating “metal” walls, armours, shields, columns. Powerful works, in spite of their non-figurative qualities and their emphasis on the minimal.
Peggy’s latest production of 2013 comes in continuation, but also marks an interesting evolution in both form and medium. The new, figurative works have biology as their basis, dealing with microscopic images and shapes of colonies of bacteria, their impressive formations resembling aquatic plants, corals, vegetable forms, water vortexes, brilliant formations like snow flakes, or maps. Their title, Bacteria, is a chilling reminder of their origins and functions. These new shapes, less geometric and austere, lighter, freer, more lyrical, play on the contrast of their beauty and their overt threat and lethal qualities. Regarding the medium, there is a new element here, too, as the building block in the new works is not the pill or empty packets, but smaller, lightweight items – none other than the little bits of silver paper that cover each pill.
Random influences, twists, developments often come to artists unexpectedly; what is definitely of interest is the assimilated influences, the artist’s personal expression and original proposition. Pills and medication are certainly a reference to Hirst; equally certain is the fact that the English artist always displays a mood of exhibitionism and explicit, repeated, aggressive provocation. On the contrary, Kliafa achieves a pleasant, poetic surprise in her work.
The body of her work has affinities with Minimal Art, Op Art, and of course Conceptual Art. Her art has a direct, sincere relationship with the minimal, with the common, as well as with geometric forms that are clearly defined with respect to space and viewers’ perception. She achieves the ultimate rationality of form through a systematic, laborious, and time consuming process. In her hands the common becomes powerful, invested with meaning. Peggy’s works throw into relief Adorno’s thought that art acquires meaning, significance, in the absence of function.
The visual interplay of lines, surfaces, planes, colours, where applicable, as well as the harmonious linear layout with flawless combinations of positive and negative, concave and convex, in a luminous polysemy create a visual stimulation that links the artist to Op Art. The stimulation of the gaze engenders an aesthetic interplay of light. In her works, the strictly organized groups highlight the relationship of light, shapes, and forms, resulting in a visual experience with a quality of motion and change, despite the stillness of the whole.
The mathematical structure, proportion, juxtaposition, and treatment of the building blocks of used packaging, or pills, are based on an empirical semantic system under development. Constructivist elements, combined with minimalist and conceptual loans, round off the artist’s aesthetic proposition. Yet, the manner in which the Greek artist manages her dominant influences from major movements and pursuits of 20th-century art has a certain purity in its eclecticism and a distinctively personal involvement. For instance, while remaining committed to the principle of conceptualism regarding the supremacy of content, the superiority of concept, of idea, on form, on figuration, she substantially deviates from this principle, as, even though the idea is dominant, the end result takes on an equally essential importance. The emphasis on a manual, time consuming, tedious creative process also becomes a key component in the accomplishment of her work.
The impeccable technique, application, and aesthetic effect achieve a simulacrum, a tromp l’oeil whose appeal – especially when the viewer realizes its physical nature – transcends, perhaps even confronts reality. Her works raise issues such as the ephemeral, or the relationship of high and humble art. Finally, the strong conceptual background, combined with the humble, perishable, and worthless material and the inspired execution enable aesthetic enjoyment.
The artist places importance, as we have seen, on the reception, study, and seriousness in handling the inspirations and assimilated influences that help achieve a sincere, personal proposition. The sincerity of her proposition and her commitment to making her own her primary material – pill packages or pills – draw parallels with a glorious period of contemporary Greek art – the legendary 1960s generation, which managed to be up to date with the international developments of the time and which, encouraged by avant-garde movements, expressed itself with perseverance, wisdom, and originality, each artist’s chosen medium becοming a hallmark for them. Examples include pegs, papers, affiches massicotées (shredded poster paper), plaster, weaves or clothing, trade cartons or burlap, used by Kostas Karachalios (1923), Pavlos (1930), Kaniaris (1928-2011), and Daniel (1924-2008). It is an honour for this young artist to come half a century later as a worthy continuation, proposing equally original and personal work.
Moreover, Kliafa’s works take their leads from many better- or lesser-known important artists. Suffice it to point out, from older ones, the characteristic Artériosclérose, of 1961, by Arman (1928), an assemblage with forks and spoons, or Kreis, of 1970, by Günter Uecker (1930), with its homocentric arrangement of hundreds of nails that attract and refract light in their folds, or Light Corner, of 2000, by the younger artist Carsten Höller (1961), a wall of light made up of countless bulbs.
Peggy’s Pharmakon is a brave and powerful proposition in every respect. On the conceptual and the formal plane; in execution, in completeness – and this is why the end result, after the initial surprise due to the material, inspires aesthetic enjoyment and an uplift of the soul. It is the reflection of the idea, the form and the aesthetic effect, and that is why it is fitting to cite a statement by the minimalist artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) that, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”.
Dr. Lina Tsikouta-Deimezi
Art Historian
Curator, National Gallery