Zoumboulakis Galleries present Myrto Stampoulou’s solo exhibition entitled “The Gruen Effect” on Thursday, January 16th 2020 at 8 pm.
Eugenia Tzirtzilaki, of Libby Sacer Daughters, notes on her text about the exhibition: “In 1938, the Jewish architect Victor Gruen, socialist owner of a political cabaret in Vienna, arrives in New York, in fear of Nazism. Combining architecture with his experience from show business, he starts designing storefronts. He uses space, light and sound so effectively, that even passersby are tempted to shop.
A few years later, he is the first to introduce the concept of a mall.The Gruen Effect refers to the moment when someone becomes disorientated within the idealized reality of a commercial space, forgets any initial intention and shops impulsively. In a controlled environment, with no windows or clocks, one may easily lose track of time and through a manipulation of imagination, associate anything there with what one truly desires.
The Gruen effect is the captivation of attention and manipulation of desire motivated by profit.
After years of researching malls and the privatization of public space, virtual presence, sci-fi and the gender aspect of artificial intelligence, Myrto Stampoulou exercises a similar influence on our attention: she captivates the viewer with enlarged fictional realities in which we are emerged and then led into a new kind of questions.
In the exhibition, Myrto Stampoulou presents mostly black and white large format drawings in which different images coexist. A diamond mine, a desert, porn film stills, robots, zombies, Gruen himself, an award-winning bodybuilder, fruit, flowers, the Skouries gold mine in Chalkidiki, blind screens and other images come together in compositions of hypnotizing beauty. These collages of different thoughts, drawn anew as singular realities, create fields of tension. Oddly enough, these juxtapositions seem organic; this series of diptychs are presented to us already digested by Stampoulou’s perception as unified, electrifying landscapes, concepts or sensations. Exactly as the word Storgi (Greek for Affection) was combined with Orgi (Greek for Rage) by the neo-feminist queer movement of Athens during the crisis era, to produce the word stORGI which became not only a word game but also a concept, the same way, the juxtapositions of images that Myrto Stampoulou creates, pass through our aesthetic perception only to generate reflection somewhere much deeper”.
Brief CV: Myrto Stampoulou was born in Athens in 1975. She studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts and journalism at the Ergastiri School (Laboratory of Professional Journalism). In 2007 she completed her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art where she studied with full scholarship by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY). She has had 3 solo shows in Athens and Glasgow. She was a member of the artist group Libby Sacer Foundation and currently a member of its evolution into Libby Sacer Daughters. She has worked as a set and costume designer and artistic director for film and theatrical productions.
