Outset Greece was proud to have supported the first retrospective exhibition of Christos Tzivelos titled ‘Modelling Phenomena‘ at the Benaki Museum Annexe on Pireos street.
Christos Tzivelos (1949-1995) defined his engagement in art through the intellectual and manual processing of nature. “The artist’s hand,” he said in an interview, “can cultivate a relationship with natural phenomena such as light.” Entitled ‘Modelling Phenomena’ his first retrospective exhibition presented the key moments in his oeuvre, highlighting its lesser-known or unknown aspects.
Using mainly light, Christos Tzivelos created a series of poetic and highly meditative images that justify his place among the most gifted Greek visual artists of the ’80s and ’90s. The exhibition at the Benaki Museum underscored his relation with semantics, Greek mythology, philosophy, alchemy and cosmology. It also traced the different stages in his work, with an emphasis on the three-dimensional, self-illuminated installations for which he was best known.
The exhibition comprised works made between 1977 and 1995, starting with a replica of his interactive installation for the group exhibition “Myth and Reality” in Bari, Italy, and ending with an unfinished drawing from the “Lights-Fossils” series. Also presented were his intangible works, such as the projections of insects, and the spherical glass bulbs. A wealth of material from the artist’s personal archive (sketches, models, handwritten notes, invitations, catalogues and books) were exhibited in showcases, along with the screening of a digitised film, courtesy of Diohandi, with Tzivelos’s early installations in the context of group exhibitions of Greek artists abroad.
For Tzivelos light has functioned as the primal material, as a materia prima, since 1983. It is enclosed in sculptural forms of wax or resin. Light shapes the forms, raising them from darkness. Tzivelos connects light with cosmogony, the myth of the creation of the universe and, indirectly, with cosmology and the Big Bang, since light and fire are equated. Hephaestus, Prometheus, Hermes/Mercury, Hermaphroditus, Ares/Mars, the god of war, and Apollo, the god of light, are intertwined in the artist’s occult installations that function as geometrical “magical signs” and narrations full of multi-layered meanings.
Christos Tzivelos’s retrospective at the Benaki Museum attempted to record and present the traces of a “falling star” to a broader public. In the eighteen active years before his untime death in 1995, the artist managed to leave behind a remarkable body of sculptures characterised by originality, cohesion and maturity. As an epic artist and a genuine headlight child, he has bequeathed certain images of thought which continue to elicit strong emotions.
The exhibition was accompanied by a bilingual publication (English-Greek) of the artist’s work. The book, edited by Christopher Marinos and Bia Papadopolou, was designed by Studio Lialios Vazoura. Christos Tzivelos – Modelling Phenomena was published by the Benaki Museum and Big black mountain the darkness never ever comes (Athens 2017).
OPENING: 4th of December 2017, 20.00
ON VIEW: 5th December 2017 – 18th February 2018
