EXHIBITIONS
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (EMST) / ATHENS
Something like a poem, a nude, and flowers in a vase
National Museum of Contemporary Art presents (Project Room 1 - 3rd floor) the solo exhibition of Eleni Bagaki "Something Like A Poem, a nude and flowers in a vase", from 28 January to 7 May 2023.
© The essence is real, 2022 Oil on canvas 140 x 150 cm Courtesy of Eleni Koronaiou Gallery and the artist
Bagaki’s work in painting, sculpture, drawing, text, sound and videos revolves around a persistent development of auto-fiction. Through the reconstruction of personal experiences or the creation of imagined events, Bagaki explores issues surrounding erotic relationships, sexuality, gender representations, and the precarity that many of the younger generation experience in Greece. Central to her artistic practice is nomadic wandering and flight as an existential condition in the quest for a sense of belonging. The exhibition at EMST, the artist’s first major museum presentation, features a series of paintings with compositions of human figures standing alone or interacting in natural landscapes. The starting point for these works is desire: Bagaki’s dreamy paintings are produced, as she emphasizes, by and for desire. Intimations of physical attraction and erotic observation shape the artist’s relationship with the depicted bodies and their environment. The exhibition unfolds as a kind of dreamlike wandering and observation on desire, sexuality, and erotic quest.
Curated by Tina Pandi
