Opy Zouni

OPY ZOUNI

She is perhaps the most valid presence within Greece today in the realm of geometric art and she is indeed an artist of international repute.The mysterious atmosphere that her work exhudes gives it an almost metaphysical feeling.

My first geometrical drawings even as a child were influenced by arabesques, a clearly abstract geometrical play with intense mystical character that defines the East and partly includes Greece. The geometrical element progressively dominated my work, defining its form, while much later I got to know the Bauhaus school which hence became a positive contribution in my study.

Most elements that compose my work derive from the observation of nature, my immediate surroundings and optical phenomena. Of these last, my interest lies mainly in the simple forms (for example, how light moves on different levels), and more rarely on synthetic forms.

Nature has laws. Basically that's what teaches me. The same events are recorded differently by the eye of each observer. What my own eye records is the beginning of my search and the continuation of another one that I have already started. At any event, the way I think and work is the outcome of an idea I have in my mind, and

not the result of a specific theory or observations which have helped me in the past.

Thus light, shadow, color, movement, perspective, space, matter, are the elements around which my observations take place, directly or even indirectly, as for example through photographic recording. The last interests me because it "sees" another visual aspect than that of the human eye, which works abstractively like visual memory.

I try to express myself with the greatest intensity possible, using few elements and often contradictory. Something which especially characterizes me is an intense sense of the fluidity in time. That's why I am prepared to interrupt my work for something else, in the thought that what is offered to me at every moment is irreplaceable. Life, the succession of events, require a free encounter.

Opy Zouni

OPY ZOUNI
“Itineraries through light and colour”

15 November 2006 – 20 January 2007

The exhibition “Itineraries through light and colour” by Opy Zouni concludes the celebrations for the twenty years of the Museum of Cycladic Art.

This is a presentation of the artist’s most recent ideas, with reference to earlier work of the last twenty-five years. The New Wing of the MCA becomes the venue for the presentation of a true “vision of today”. In this project, Zouni attempts to transform the environment of contemporary people, as experience in their work-space but also in the area of imagination. Her creations present cityscapes coexisting with nature in dream-like compositions. Constructions with mirrors that converse with and enliven the surrounding space, and installations with parallel mirrors that create multiple reflections.

The emphasis is on recent works as well as on creations that have not been presented in Athens before. Visitors to the exhibition can also watch the video A ramble in form, (duration: 6½ minutes), where the artist analyses her subjects by constructing and deconstructing the composition of her works.



Opy Zouni notes about the concept of the exhibition:
“After the experience from constructions and works in black-and-white, the horizon opened up for the exhaustive study of colour. Geometry never became an obstacle; on the contrary, it was a constant challenge for the parallel development of the material as the gradual result of a gestural script. I decided for this exhibition to span a period of twenty-five years. This was meant not as a strict chronological limit but rather as an outline for a selection of samples; indeed, in some cases it was not observed. In the end, I gave greater emphasis to recent works.”



The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph by Dr. Yannis Bolis (Curator at the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki) where Zouni’s entire oeuvre from the 1960s to the present day is analysed chronologically and thematically. The book contains also brief testimonies by such eminent figures as Rector Eleni Ahrweiler, Charis Kambouridis (Art Critic-Semanticist), Charis Savvopoulos (Professor of Art History at the University of Thessaloniki), Dr. Eugenia Alexaki (Art-historian) and a swansong review by the late Pierre Restany, international Art Critic.

In order to facilitate visitors, the MCA will remain open every Wednesday until 8.00 p.m. for the period of the exhibition.

Curator: Dr Yannis Bolis