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Pharmakon: exhibition by Peggy Kliafa at the Kappatos Gallery
Kappatos Gallery inaugurates on Thursday the 28th of November 2013 the exhibition by the visual artist Peggy Kliafa, entitled Pharmakon, which consists of works produced from 2008 to date.
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,” as mentioned in the characteristic note accompanying the exhibition. The artist states that the three sections of her works on display, “illustrate the history of therapeutics as a palimpsest of metaphysics, nature, and science.”
The three sections comprise paintings, murals, reliefs, mosaics, installations, and video art.
In her works, the strong conceptual background, combined with the humble, perishable and worthless material and the inspired execution, characterised by a time-consuming manual element, always ensure aesthetic enjoyment.
Peggy Kliafa is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts.
