Zoumboulakis Gallery presents the new solo exhibition by Jannis Psychopedis, titled “Palermo. People and Ruins”, from January 16 to February 8, 2025 – an installation of painted bricks and roof tiles, surrounded by a series of one hundred mixed media drawings.
As the artist writes: “Occasioned by a recent trip to Magna Grecia and the ruins of its Sicilian cultures, and then, later, walking around the welcoming Greek coasts of the Peloponnese, far removed from the paranoia of the metropolis’ compulsions, we discovered the small treasures that the sea so lavishly gives out. Where it washes up on the shore wonderful stones, pebbles, broken pieces of wood, shells, weathered plastics, rusty metals, eroded chunks of marble. But mostly, it sweeps in the lightest of all these, the ones easily pushed out by the waves, that fill up the beaches: broken bricks and roof tiles, those small, altered forms, terracotta fragments that have lost their original shapes, after years in the water. Sown in the sand, strange looking, these “hives” of broken bricks and chipped fragments, with their form smoothed out by time, are looking for an imaginary, elliptical microcosm of an unusual microsculpture made up of masses, plastic rhythms and the curves of warm colour tones. They were once parts of old edifices, fragments and scraps of proud buildings, human structures for humble or majestic habitats, witnesses of other ages, traces in time, passing through and leaving behind only ruins. From a distant or recent past, washed up in the present, these broken pieces evoke in our minds their imagined prehistory, another life that once existed, human beings building and securing their homes, their hopes and their dreams.
These shattered memories, the fragments of another life, are calling today to be transformed through the visual language into small, symbolic “valleys of the temples”, fantastical buildings and dwellings, primitive new settlements, testaments of a new hope for the continuation of life.
New, peculiar brick structures creating rainbows of “hives of life”, multicoloured beings of resurrected, small, built-again ruins, in the face of savage times, in the face of monochrome, black, dark omens”.
Short biographical note
He was born in Athens in 1945.
He studied printmaking on a scholarship at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1963-1968). He pursued postgraduate studies in painting (1970-1976) at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, on a scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He subsequently settled in Germany, as a guest of the city of West Berlin Art Residency programme. In 1994, he was appointed to a professorship at the Athens School of Fine Arts. During the 1960s, he was a member of “Art Group A” and the visual arts team at Epitheorisi Technis magazine. He was also a founding member of the “New Greek Realists” (1971-1973) and the Visual Arts Centre (1974-1976). Since 1996, he has been showing his work in solo and group exhibitions in major European cities, the US and Japan.
