Jack Pierson – Marina Karella | “for those of us who know, we know…”*
Zoumboulakis Galleries present the exhibition by Marina Karella and Jack Pierson. The exhibition, featuring a mix of new paintings by Marina Karella and a selection of drawings, photographic and sculptural works by the American artist Jack Pierson in collaboration with Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.
The native land is always a source of inspiration for Marina Karella. Karella has never left Greece. She carries her Hellenic psyche with her no matter where she is. Like Cavafy’s dreamt up from Alexandria, is the Greece that Marina Karella paints, underlines the art critic Andrien Goetz. Her paintings resembling palimpsests where images, memories and symbols become the basis for the creation of new. Marina Karella’s painting shows us fragments of a not-so-distant era. Her works, either as a whole or piecemeal, allow the viewer to make his own story; a journey to the past, an adventure at the present, a vision for the future always from the point of view of his personal poetry
Pierson’s practice embodies an array of media spanning from word-pieces, installations, drawings, paintings and photographs. The artworks exhibited in Zoumboulakis Galleries, especially the word- pieces, are excellent examples of his art. Pierson first began making his word-sculptures in 1991, utilizing found objects – mismatched letters salvaged from junkyards, old movie marquees, roadside diners, Las Vegas casinos, and other forsaken enterprises. The word sculptures create individual words or phrases that evoke a multiplicity of meanings. Simultaneously, there will be on show a series of drawings on paper under the general title “Antinoos” and five photographs that buoyed the characteristic aura of seduction and charm, a special feature of his pictures.
* The title of the exhibition comes from a free rendition of the verse “We the initiated—his intimate friends—we the initiated know about whom those lines were written” of the poem “Temethos, Antiochian, A.D. 400” by Constantine Cavafy. This verse reminds us that what is raised as a subject and as the central face of a poem, of an artwork in general, is only an “alibi”, in order for the creator to express his personal experiences and feelings.
