PRESS RELEASE
A solo exhibition by Lizzie Calligas
‘The Flowers of the Pandemic’
Curated by: Apostolis Artinos
Opening Day: 21 September 2023, 19.30-21.30
Duration: 21 September – 14 October 2023
Skoufa Gallery proudly presents Lizzie Calligas’ new solo exhibition, titled ‘The flowers of the Pandemic’, curated by Apostolos Artinos.
The exhibition includes a series of paintings executed during the recent pandemic.
The Opening day is on the 21st September, between 19.30 and 21.30 and the exhibition will run until the 14th October 2023.
During the quarantine, Lizzie Calligas retired at her house in Spetses. There, she managed to escape from this time of indolence. She kept herself busy by painting and photographing vases and flowers while in the prime of their life and at other times, dried or withered. Her flowers became the reflection of these dark days of the quarantine. In a fleeting period when everything is ephemeral, Lizzie Kalligas’ flowers mark the eternity of the momentum.
As mentioned in Apostolis Artinos’ text that accompanies the exhibition:
“…A vase with flowers then, which is also a poetic act, an act of transformation. Flowers after all, have always been linguistic signals of a material refinement that gives birth to the immateriality of its idea within this world. They were, and continue to be, the ideal of the real, a poetical type within the field of our worldliness, and as such, the signs of a transition and of a mental transcendence. The flowers, a subject Calligas loves and often returns to within her practice, re-surface in this series in an obsessive manner. The subject of her focus is the same vase and its time, rendered in multiple versions, oftentimes materializing as a diptych or a quadriptych in a mournful procession. Images come together in the dipole of a gesture that is at once synthetic and abstract. It is during this oscillation that things regain their anguished representational form, not in the conquered language of a technique but in a weak gesture which gives life to things and traces them at the same time. “I used to wake up at night”, Lizzie confided, “and went down to the studio to look for the right color.” Images, including digital ones, are the palimpsest of themselves, an over and over again of their unfolding”.
