Nikos Alexiou represents Greece in the 52nd Venice Biennale with the work “The End”, a modular installation inspired by the floor mosaic in the Catholicon of the Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos (10th-11th c. AD).
Concurrently, on November 8 2007, he will exhibit under the same title at Zoumboulakis Galleries (20 Kolonaki Square) a series of large-scale prints (on archival paper) of the digitally manipulated representation of the floor mosaic.
The valuable material (photographs, drawings, etc.) from the creative evolution of the work THE END, Athens-Venice 2007, will be included in a special limited edition book, created and signed by the artist. The book will be available from Zoumboulakis Galleries and selected bookstores.
Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, commissioner / curator of the Hellenic participation in the 52nd Venice Biennale, comments in the exhibition catalogue: «Alexiou belongs to that generation of artists who, during the 1980s, expanded the object of art into the realm of installation… He turned from the outset to a fragile and ephemeral world which he introduced into the artistic language, setting the obsessive use of non figurative grids, patterns, decorations and repetitive structures as a kind of existential metaphor».
