Skoufa gallery is pleased to present Dimitris Tzamouranis’ solo exhibition, titled “The wing beat of a butterfly”. The opening reception will be on the 17th of March and the exhibition will run until the 9th of April 2022.
The title of the exhibition refers to the so called “butterfly effect” in chaos theory where an action is a phenomenon of a non-linear dynamic that may cause unpredictable long-term changes at the initial conditions of a system. The term was first used by the meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz, who, in order to describe the unpredictability of natural phenomena, speculated if “The wing beat of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas?”
In our progressive society, we tend to believe that humanity is capable of controlling all aspects of life with technical media. In periods of crises, like the one that we currently live in, we have to accept that chaotic systems prevail beyond any human control. This realization – which is not particularly new, as well as the knowledge that we can lose our sense of safety, throw us in paralytic and sometimes psychotic situations.
In order to escape from such difficult conditions, we frequently seek solace and therapy in nature which becomes our shelter. The more untouched and purer it is, the more comfort we gain from it. It is within nature that we acknowledge the superiority of the ‘uncontrollable chaos’ and liberated from the burden of trying to struggle against it, we regard it as divine order.
Most of Dimitris Tzamouranis’ paintings are in a large-scale format. They start as theatrical scenes that the artist sets up at his workshop. The participants of these scenes undertake roles that Tzamouranis borrows from Mantegna’s or Velasquez’s iconography. As a result, the artist succeeds in transmuting moral and cultural values which are inscribed in our collective memory from the past to a contemporary political and cultural context. Tzamouranis’ painting does not use this classical structure to depict the contemporary ‘golden era’ of a society of lonely, depressing narcissists. His painting reveals rather a desperation for the loss of these values.
Short bio
Dimitris Tzamouranis was born in Kalamata, in 1967. He studied painting at the School of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and continued with post-graduate studies at the Universitat der Kunste (UdK) in Berlin. In 1995, he received an award from the Spyropoulos Foundation in Athens. Since 1990, he had over 20 solo exhibitions at various galleries and museums around Europe (Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic). In 2013, Frissiras Museum in Athens organized a retrospective exhibition for Dimitris Tzamouranis. He has participated in many group exhibitions at important international art and cultural institutions. In 2017 he exhibited at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. His paintings can be found in major art collections both in Greece and abroad. He lives and works in Berlin.
