Zoumboulakis Gallery presents Peggy Kliafa’s new solo exhibition, Healing the Grid, curated by Dr. Sozita Goudouna. The exhibition is at once unexpected and quietly paradoxical. Through works of remarkable elegance and formal refinement, it articulates profound and often painful truths, choosing beauty as the very means through which they are conveyed. Beauty, therefore, performs a dual function: it first communicates the need for healing, and then seeks the remedy itself, offering a clear and compelling response. This, I would suggest, is the exhibition’s first and most significant proposition: the transformative agency of beauty.
Kliafa’s works could effortlessly inhabit the reception hall of a leading bank or pharmaceutical corporation. They are exquisitely beautiful, seductive, and intellectually sophisticated. Yet they refuse to remain within the confines of such an environment. Instead, they gently invite the viewer into a dialogue, communicating a truth of their own: neither the container—the package—nor its contents—the medicine itself—are sufficient. Inspiration, however, may bring about another kind of healing.
This is precisely what the works achieve. Constructed from the discarded remnants of the pharmaceutical industry—empty blister packs whose former contents have become irrelevant—they generate an aesthetic experience in which artistic creation transforms these humble materials into objects of extraordinary beauty. On an immediate level, the artist reveals the unexpected beauty of the packaging itself.
Kliafa’s works possess such visual allure that one almost forgets the materials from which they are made. Yet a second encounter shifts one’s attention. Once the viewer recognizes the material of this proposed “healing,” perception moves beyond the dazzling shimmer and luminous colours that first captivate the eye, towards what these packages once contained: the chemistry of healing itself—the pills.
Perhaps through an urban visual language, Kliafa addresses one of the defining and deeply unsettling realities of our time, a reality that has become increasingly visible, particularly since wastewater analyses conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our society sustains itself through psychotropic medication; contemporary life has become dependent upon industrially manufactured pharmaceuticals—the very substances we instinctively imagine once occupied the packages that now constitute the material fabric of Kliafa’s works.
Medicine therefore assumes the role of protagonist in her practice—and, more specifically, so does its packaging. The decision to employ pharmaceutical packaging as an artistic medium is all the more compelling because it evokes the medicine while no longer containing it. Kliafa does not lament this condition; instead, she proposes healing. The remedy she offers, with remarkable conviction, is the beauty generated through artistic creation. This proposition emerges directly from the works themselves, without requiring elaborate interpretation. As for beauty itself, the artist suggests that it may arise from any material whatsoever—even industrial pharmaceutical packaging, refuse, and the discarded remnants of everyday life.
Healing is the essential aspiration embodied by these works through their very presence in space and time. It is the healing of the grid. In this context, healing is understood as the transformation of materials through artistic creation into beauty.
Throughout the exhibition, monumental sculptures and large-scale artworks have been created from blister packs, capsules in a multitude of colours, and pharmacy bags. Pills with their varied forms and colours, transparent capsules, glossy blister packs, and aluminium foils—which in themselves resemble miniature sculptures—offer an abundance of materials and ideas that “I employ much as another artist might use pigments, clay, tesserae, or other traditional media. In my chandeliers, transparent capsules are transformed into crystal-like elements that catch and refract the light; in my shields, blister packs evoke the impenetrable surface of polished metal”. But are pills and capsules themselves the material of healing proposed by the artist? Evidently not. The true material of healing lies in the outcome of their transformation: the aesthetic experience, the beauty that artistic composition ultimately brings into being.
Perhaps the most elusive question arises at the point where language encounters the works and waits for an answer. The grid that calls for healing is neither the patient nor the illness, but rather an idea—a conceptual structure designated simply as the “grid.” Here Kliafa operates within a realm of poetic mysticism, inviting interpretations that remain necessarily open and deeply personal. It is here that a second observation naturally emerges for the attentive viewer.
The exhibition’s curator writes in the beautifully designed publication accompanying the exhibition, produced by Sakkoulas Publications:
“The grid is the silent dictator of modernity. It structures our cities, our screens, even our medical practices. From the relentless right angles of the Manhattan 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 simultaneously sustains and suffocates, heals and controls.”
The title, however, invites multiple associations. It may evoke The Healing Grid Illusion,[1] the optical illusion devised by Ryota Kanai; or Healing Grid, the composition by ODESZA. It may equally recall J. R. Minkel’s article Healing the Grid: Several Near-Term Solutions Can Keep the Juice Flowing, originally published under the title Healing the Grid in Scientific American (Vol. 289, No. 5, November 2003). As the curator herself suggests, it may also resonate with Derrida’s writings or with Plato’s Phaedrus.
Our own reading, however, is drawn more readily toward the electrical power grid—the indispensable network upon which contemporary life depends. It is through this grid that energy reaches the countless devices that sustain our daily existence; ultimately, it is through this network that life itself is powered. An electrical grid is a system of interconnected transmission lines through which electricity flows from producers to consumers. But what, then, might a “healing grid” be?
In the most immediate sense, a healing grid may be understood as a more intelligent network—one that employs sensing, communication, and control technologies to detect disruptions and respond to unforeseen events in real time.
This understanding also allows us to accept another possible interpretation, one that Kliafa’s work strongly suggests: the notion of a grid composed of healing crystals. The very materials she employs generate an autonomous crystalline network, shimmering with its own internal logic. To heal the grid, then, would mean that through art—and through beauty as art’s highest expression—we restore the very foundation of an energetic matrix of healing crystals. In works that glisten like crystal formations, Kliafa offers her own medium of crystallotherapy: an aesthetic experience whose restorative power resides not in medicine, but in beauty itself.
Peggy Kliafa is a contemporary visual artist working across multiple media. She lives and works in Athens. She graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts, Department of Painting, with Sculpture as her principal area of study (Integrated Master’s Degree, 2011–2012), and previously earned a degree in Business Administration with a specialisation in Marketing from the Athens University of Economics and Business (1990).
Her solo exhibitions include presentations at Lola Nikolaou Gallery, Thessaloniki (2016), and Kappatos Gallery, Athens (2013–2014). She has also participated in two three-person exhibitions at Lola Nikolaou Gallery (2019) and at the Averoff Museum of Contemporary Art, Metsovo (2017–2018), in addition to more than sixty group exhibitions and international art fairs in Greece and abroad.
Peggy Kliafa is, above all, a person of uncommon generosity and grace. It is with this quiet generosity that she gives form to truths that are not always easy to confront. In this latest exhibition, she strikes the viewer—not with violence, but with the beauty of her works, delivering a blow to the inner grid each of us carries within. Through an aesthetic language of extraordinary power, she ultimately seeks not to unsettle alone, but to heal. And she does so through beauty.
Eleni Trova
Associate Professor of International Cultural Heritage Law
International Hellenic University
[1] The Healing Grid Illusion is an optical illusion created by scientist Ryota Kanai. It was a finalist in the 2005 Best Illusion of the Year competition and is known for its striking peripheral visual effect.