Recent Works
Solo Exhibition
26.01 – 18.02/2017
The solo exhibition with new paintings by Dimitris Yeros will be inaugurated on Thursday 26 January 2017, at 20.00 and will be the first exhibition in Athens, in 20 years.
The exhibition will run until the 18th of February, before travelling to Thessaloniki, Nicosia and New York.
These are monochrome paintings on canvas—most black, some red- which could be seen as a continuation of the black and white silhouettes of the mid-18th century, but also of the ancient Greek black figure pottery of the 7th century BC.
All works were painted during 2016 and, apart from a few of the recurring symbols that run through Yeros’s oeuvre (the running man, the clouds, the horizon etc.), they have little in common with the lustrous polychrome paintings for which he is best known. His subject matter is markedly different, too, though his concerns for the environment and the related works of Man are still present and undiminished. However, most of his new works are influenced by recent, unfortunate political developments and by the refugee/immigrant issue, which he has experienced at first hand due to the long time he spends on Lesbos. Thus, he will be showing, among other things, well-painted ape figures with human faces, as new “Political Animals”, refugees battling the waves as a naked angel descends to them from heaven holding a lifejacket that can sometimes look like a victor’s wreath in reward for their struggles, and sometimes like a funeral wreath to mark their watery graves, migrants threatened by giant crows and eagles, by which the artist is hinting at the barbarous Turkish traffickers who exploit them so inhumanely. We’ll also see the Chinese activist-artist Ai Weiwei, videoing the unfortunate arrivals as they head into the unknown.
It should be noted that this is not the first time Dimitris Yeros has used his work to comment on contemporary and topical themes. In 1969, in a show staged at the Goethe Institut in Thessaloniki and subsequently at the New Gallery in Athens, he put his freedom on the line by exhibiting large-scale black works, many of them covered in barbed wire with red lights flashing behind it, as a protest against the military junta. Then, in 1993, he showed primarily black works—at the Skoufa Gallery once again—in a show entitled Lekedes (Stains), condemning the daily Press for its obscurantism and propensity to misinform.
Dimitris Yeros’s last Athens show was staged 20 years ago, in 1997, at the Athens Art Gallery.
Athena Schina notes the following, inter alia, about the works on display:
“In this group of works, the artist shadow-boxes with the dilemmas life presents. He is more austere and vitriolic, more enigmatically succinct and allusively compact. But, thanks to a stealthy but controlled sentimentalism, his narrative never loses sight of its goals as its meanings—indeed, it is enhanced on multiple levels. Self-critical, willing to rethink and pour scorn on his work, to call conventions into question, stoic and erotic, with equal doses of humour and pain that leave him (and us) unsure whether to laugh or cry, Dimitris Yeros inducts his viewers into a different climate each time, which makes them decode more directly the notation of the subjects he reads visually and feels almost musically. Through the aroma of and longing for a paradise lost, his subjects simultaneously represent and reference broader areas of the mind and the imagination. And we can be quite certain that these bright, shimmering expanses convey the gaze to their white and unconfessed truths which, unrecorded, we somehow sense to exist far beyond their black and white visual display.”
