Zoumboulakis Gallery presents Vassiliki Koukou’s solo exhibition, entitled “Where flowers are singing”, which opens on Thursday, April 25, 2024, curated by Angeliki Baras.
Paintings, cloth creatures and flowers will coexist in the installation presented at the gallery.
“Images of creatures, plants, potions, totems and unidentified figures taken from the realm of illusion, mythology and fairy tale are spreading across the gallery’s space. In Koukou’s work the poetic rhythms of color converse with childish spontaneity, bringing to life multiple narratives, explicit or complex, combined with personal experiences. The artist conveys personal thoughts and warm memories through agile, airy and elastic forms guided by colored resonances of the senses.
Koukou’s artistic practice is based on the expansion of the magical world of art in everyday life, but also vice versa. Hybrid painting compositions of various dimensions and materials orchestrate a stylistic dialogue between color and gesture. Through an ecofeminist approach, Koukou presents a world where existence is indestructible, interpreting life through the stages of nature’s self-creation. The timeless symbols of Koukou’s painting have a significant role as the basic pillars of the proper functioning of a universe, without discrimination or hierarchies, where cooperation prevails over individual action.
Real plants, from Polyamorous, converse with surreal flowers, roots, ceramic potions and three-dimensional creatures made of fabric, transforming the gallery space into a colorful oasis.”
Curated by Angeliki Baras
Short Bio:
Vasiliki Koukou (b. 1996) graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts (BA & Integrated Master, Painting). In 2019 she was awarded the Rosa’s Luxemburg Foundation Award in Greece and Berlin and in 2020 she won the second prize “Gre-Taste: The taste of Greece” from the Vassilis and Marina Theocharakis Foundation for the Visual Arts and Music. In 2017 she was a performer for Documenta 14 and in 2020 she curated and performed “A Metamorphosis performance?” for the project Performance Rooms Kappatos, St. George Lycabettus Hotel. Her works have been shown in museums and institutions such as the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation, the War Museum, the Byzantine Museum and others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as, “Resilient by Nature”, Zoumboulakis Gallery (2023), “Open-Ended”, Zoumboulakis Gallery (2022), “Inertia II”, Bageion Hotel (2022), “Volcan of Santorini Project”, Zoumboulakis Gallery (2021), “Learn To Swim”, Zoumboulakis Gallery (2021), “Art on Boards | The Skate Project”, Zoumboulakis Gallery (2021), “The Empty Gallery”, Shrine Gallery, New York (2021), “Counting Approximately 1,5M”, a.antonopoulou.art gallery (2020), Maximos Mansion (2019-2020), “Rooms Contemporary Art Exhibition”, Kappatos Gallery (2019), “Rosa’s New Clothes”, Ikastikos Kiklos D.L. (2019) and others. In her work she uses abstraction and surreal representation to invoke a sense of the mythical and magical. She lives and works in Athens, Greece.
