Daily Lazy has invited three artists connected with the Athenian art scene to introduce themselves and their practice through a display of personal statements and images.
Focusing on the relationship between local and global, we decided to introduce the work of three Greek artists who are currently based in New York, Brussels and Stockholm but retain their connection to Athens.
IRINI MIGA (b. 1981) lives in New York
In my practice I use basic sculptural materials like clay, wood, and plaster, juxtaposed with everyday ephemera, to make visible the interstices of present time, memory and bodily presence. My installations investigate the fragmentary nature of memory: its existence as both images in the mind, and as actual objects.
As a means of challenging the norms of narration, I explore any given space as a blank paper on which I “draw” my sculptures while aiming to create a relationship between figuration, abstraction and materiality.
Work in Progress, Studio Installation View, ceramic, paper, kitchen-cloth, thread, wood, cement, plaster, air, wall paint, dimension variable, 2014.
Eyes Wide Open, wood, glazed ceramic, crystal, plaster, marble, acrylic color, 178 x 53.5 x 33 cm, 2013.
Try to Catch Me if You Can, ceramic, in total: 36 x 45 x 28 cm, 2013.
Untitled, wood, welcome carpet, glazed ceramic, marble, paper, gold leaf, cement, in total: 125 x 228 x 102 cm, 2013.
Redefining Obstacles, wood, resin, marble dust, acrylic color, metal, mirror, glazed ceramic, 63.5 x 137 x 30 cm, 2012.
Artist’s Material Chamber, wood, glazed ceramic, plaster, metal, wire, dust, paper, glass, in total: 74 x 90 x 20 cm, 2013.
GIORGOS KONTIS (b.1981) lives in Brussels
My work focuses on painting and simultaneously becomes a questioning on its function as both a process and an image. A process which is itself transformed into image, or otherwise, an image that comes as the outcome of the whole procedure of painting. Painting comes in this way as a multilayered metamorphosis, a ‘highly personalized semiotic activity’1, or ‘transition’2, to a physical object which functions in a similar way to the use of language by poets. In this way what was there in the first place to be said or transmuted may remain even unsaid, and what matters at most is rather the visual outcome of this whole route.
Through the contemplation on the process of painting I have become concerned with issues of authenticity and originality in the act of it. I am concerned with where abstract painting stands today, as also, with the questioning of an almost sacred aspect that the painted image tends to get, its function as an Icon and with ‘the making of art as a heroic act of original creation’3. These questionings and concerns take place both in the process of my painting, as also, in the use and the display of the painted image.
1. Isabelle Graw, ‘’Thinking through Painting’’ 2012
2. David Joselit, ‘’Painting Beside Itself’’ October 130 (2009)
3. Jan Verwoert, ‘’Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art’’ 2007
Exhibition view, 2013, Metelcova Ljubljana
Exhibition view, 2013, Wolke Brussels
Untitled (The Inner Landscape series), 180 x 250 cm, 2013, oil, acrylic and enamel paint on canvas.
Exhibition view, 2013, De Service Garage Amsterdam
Exhibition view, 2012, Show Hall Den Bosch
Untitled (Blinky Palermo series), 27 x 21 cm, 2014, Encaustic on wood
Exhibition view, 2014, Ruimte Caesuur Middelburg
ANASTASIOS LOGOTHETIS (b. 1979) lives in Stockholm
Personal Statement – The Possibility of a Beach
The long-term project The Possibility of a Beach commenced with the artist’s withdrawal from the confines of the art world to a solitary part on the coast of Crete, Greece, for 90 days during the summer of 2010. The passing of every day was documented in writings around a wide spectrum of concepts all influenced by the premise of a life spent on a beach. Texts have ever since been used in a non-consecutive sequence as the basis for works of art and as the only constant point of return in the midst of the artist’s incessant traveling. Idleness, a contemplative mode of mind, is used as an analogy for strictly private feelings and concepts that are increasingly made difficult to inhabit in our hyper-connected societies. What cannot be mediated in economical, scientific or narrative terms is increasingly marginalized and made useless. Objects and performances are engaged to manifest a counterpoint position. The inherent qualities of their purely physical and visual mediation are used as aid to subvert the relationship between the useless and the measurable, the virtual and the tangible, the solitary and the sociable. A new economics of being emerges. The works, linked to specific days, can be combined in space and time in a modular fashion by a curator, or other various agents, to form a narrative. When a different constellation occurs between the days the narratives are dislocated to form alternate ones.
https://vimeo.com/groups/252561
Documentation still from A Day by the Beach (day#33), 2007, performance with single-channel video My Body (day #33).
Still from My Body (day #33), 2007, single-channel video, 60 sec on loop, https://vimeo.com/92390174
Still from Untitled (Stocktrading Apparatus) (day #40), 2009-2011, single-channel video, 4 min 23 sec, https://vimeo.com/34775697
Documentation still from Striptease (day #19), 2013, performance, https://vimeo.com/63425577
Installation view Water Animation #1 (day #21), 2010-2011, single-channel video, 40 sec on loop, https://vimeo.com/44446478
Installation view Water Animation #2 (day #65), 2011, single-channel video, 25 sec on loop, https://vimeo.com/44617513
Still from Invention #3 (Wavefloor) (day #65), 2011, single-channel video, 2 min 3 sec, https://vimeo.com/25973463
Daily Lazy
Daily Lazy, founded in 2011 in Athens Greece, aims to present projects touching on contemporary art issues through collaborations with artists, curators, organizations, and other practitioners involved in the arts. Daily Lazy has organized projects which revolve around the nature of artistic practice; the environment of the atelier (In The Studio, Kunsthalle Athena 2013), collaborations between artists (Hosted In Athens, an invitation to collectives, 2012) and the role of conversation in art (A conversation with, new project). The Daily Lazy projects http://dlprojects.tumblr.com/ develop through methods of documentation, research and archiving on the online blog http://daily-lazy.blogspot.de/
The current Daily Lazy team, comprising artists Stelios Karamanolis, Tula Plumi and Yorgos Stamkopoulos is based between Athens and Berlin.
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