Author: Site Adm1n

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Why Look at Animals? at EMST

Nabile Boutros, Celebrities in exhibtion Why Look at Animals

Can guilt serve as a compelling incentive for mounting an exhibition? For some of the artists exhibiting in Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), it nurtured the work. Janis Rafa’s film triptych The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth (2023) evokes the methods used to train racehorses with the help of sophisticated yet cruel equipment used to make them run blindly in circles. The artist grew up with horses, enjoyed riding them as a teenager, and took part in competitions, but reflects that the relationship between human and animal is often non-consensual, which eventually made her quit all equestrian activities. Guilt translated into taking responsibility and making the way we treat animals the focus of her research and art work.

Janis Rafa, The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth, still from 3 channel video projection, 2023

Animals play a role in most human lives from early on, but in what way exactly? Most often they serve. As means of transportation, as amusement, as a toy or a curiosum, as protection, as horsepower, or simply as food on the plate. Why Look at Animals brings together the work of over sixty artists offering diverse ways of looking at animals and reflecting on the human–animal relationship. In a film by Tiziana Pers, Saut dans le vide (2016), a truck transports pigs, one of them struggling to escape, succeeding with a courageous yet painful jump. In a filmed diptych by Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Today I Am, Tomorrow I’m Not (2023), a stray dog with three legs limps through an run-down industrial area. The film gets close to the perspective of dogs, the camera held low, showing the waste land they live in. They have a lonely if not shitty life; nobody seems to care. But then some people do, the film zooms in on a team of people who drive around and look for animals who need help, bringing them to the vet.

Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Today I Am, Tomorrow I am not, still from 2 channel video, 2023

As the base for the exhibition, EMST Director Katerina Gregos chose John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?” (which gave the show its title)in which the British author zoomed in on the way we have seen animals through different eras and on the power relationships that are implicit in, for instance, a visit to the zoo, where animals are deprived of all natural behavior and habits. His 1980 essay shakes up the comfort of commonly accepted viewpoints, from the plush toy pets children are surrounded with, to weekly zoo visits. Berger’s tone can be somewhat condescending, but as a collection of viewpoints, his essay invites a deeper consideration of how modernity and capitalism have shaped our relationship with animals.

Wesley Meuris, Enclosure for Animal (zoology), 2006-2021

Gregos has translated the material into a diverse exhibition, ranging from activist and documentarial to more philosophical or lyrical approaches. A level of abstraction can be found in Wesley Meuris’s Enclosure for Animal (zoology) (2006–21). An empty stage, a tiled mosaic floor and walls, serves as a model for animals to be caged. The presence of the animals is anticipated in the way the room is organized, where they should eat or move, but it is their absence that makes the work eerie and fascinating, putting instead the human design and intentions on display. In other cases, a poetic approach saves the exhibition from being an illustration of discussion points. The embroidered works by Britta Marakatt-Labba are based on environmental and other daily issues from Sámi life in the north of Sweden, but they attain their impact mainly through the way the artist masters embroidery in a painting-like style. Hers offers a modest yet vivid and fragile perspective.

Britta Marakatt-Labba, Between Two Worlds, Embroidery and aplique on linen, 2018-19

For Singapore-born, Helsinki-based Ang Siew Ching, it was not guilt that made her want to work on the film High-Rise Pigs (2025), about the way pigs are processed in a Chinese factory, but rather a moment of alienation when she touched a pig for the first time and could only think “bacon.” She reflects, “It was not about coming to an ethical or political position but exploring the strangeness borne out of my encounter with the pig.” She found out that knowing more about the animal’s life comes with a level of being uncomfortable. The film shows, through circling around the factory building, and presenting models of the procedures inside, exactly where we are not supposed to look, as the animals are being prepared for slaughter in an industry that is more efficient than caring. The pigs are carefully kept out of view, behind the façade of a twenty-six-story building that could just as well have been a parking lot. It is the biggest pork-producing factory situated in a rural town in China’s Hubei province, set up to meet the enormous demand for pork.

Ang Siew Ching, High Rise Pigs, still from video, 2025

Some works play directly upon the emotions, exposing the cruelty of humans, such as the portrait Tiziana Pers made of a monkey who, for scientific research, was kept awake on purpose. The painting evokes the sleep-deprived monkey as a ghost. People are pigs, you would almost say, if that were not another example of disrespecting animals.

Even though many works in the exhibition make the mood melancholic, leaning heavily on dark narratives, other contributions lift the spirits, such as Nabil Boutros’s series of sixty-five photos Celebrities / Ovine Condition (2014), presented as a frieze around the room. They are crystal clear portraits of sheep as individuals, photographed in the same way we like to take portraits of people. The artist brings us close to identification with the animals, as we read their different characters, one earnest, another proud, a third one shy. Or maybe we just project these human features on them. In any case, the effect here is that they, the animals, are one of us, rather than the other.

Even though Gregos likes to make her shows pointed with a political narrative (as the subtitle makes clear), it does not feel like guilt or accusation was her only motif or message. Despite its biennale-like size, the exhibition feels like one of the more personal shows she has curated, coming from a true connection with the subject matter, the result of growing up close to animals. The specific Greek situation, where animals are present in many rural communities but also suffer from humans’ old-fashioned authoritarian viewpoints, may have served as the dramatic starting point for an issue that, in the end, is relevant to most societies and individuals.

Who does not have a relationship with animals, you might ask walking through the extensive show, knowing that the pleasures of eating meat can be guilty. It made me think about the earliest known paintings in caves, and in that sense, about the cradle of art. The first thing people wanted to paint were animals. They were considered worth depicting, the result of fascination, respect, fear, or adoration. They have been, through the centuries and up to the present day, a mirror of human life. But can we also see them as they are?

This text was first published in The Brooklyn Rail, Dec/Jan 2025-26. The exhibition is on view from 16 May 2025 till 15 April 2026 at EMST, Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. Image header: Nabil Boutros, Celebrities, Ovine Condition, print, 2014

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Book ‘Why Paintings Work’

Why Paintings Work

In ‘Why Paintings Work’ Jurriaan Benschop navigates the diverse landscape of contemporary painting. He introduces the work of dozens of painters and asks: Why do these paintings work? In what ways do they speak to the viewer? He considers both the visible aspects of painting, such as the depicted motif and the application of paint, and the concepts, beliefs and motivations that underlie the canvas.

‘Why Paintings Work’ is not just about how we look at paintings, but also about finding a language that suits the art and viewing experience of today. Throughout the book different themes come up, while looking at the work of contemporary painters, such as nature, the body, touch, movement, identity, memory and spirituality.

Among the artists featured in this book are: Nikos Aslanidis, David Benforado, Louise Bonnet, Glenn Brown, Maria Capelo, Peter Doig, Béatrice Dreux, Helmut Federle, Beverly Fishman, Elisabeth Frieberg, Victoria Gitman, Veronika Hilger, Martha Jungwirth, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Kristi Kongi, Mark Lammert, Rezi van Lankveld, Michael Markwick, Kerry James Marshall, Lara de Moor, Matthew Metzger, Marc Mulders, Kaido Ole, Jorge Queiroz, Fiona Rae, Daniel Richter, Jessica Stockholder, Marc Trujillo, Anna Tuori, Matthias Weischer, Paula Zarina-Zemane and Gerlind Zeilner.

The book contains 284 pages with more than 100 illustrations in color, paperback 14 x 20 cm, in English. Published May 2023 by Garret Publications, Helsinki. Bookshops order through Idea books in Amsterdam *** ISBN 9789527222171 *** Individuals can order through their local (art)bookshop or online sellers. You can also order your copy through the webshop on this website.

Here are some shops where the book is available or can be ordered:

E U R O P E Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Berlin Martin Gropius Bau, Düsseldorf K20 and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ermoupoli Jenny up the Hill, Helsinki Suomalainen; Prisma, Manchester: Unitom, Münster: Extrabuch, Riga: Zuzeum, Stockholm, Göteborg: Adlibris

U S A Houston TX: Basket Books, Boston, MA: ICA Store, Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Artand Stories, San Diego: The Shop at MCASD

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Andreas Kassapis at Annex M

Can a good painting specifically not be a celebration of life? This question came up while I was looking at Andreas Ragnar Kassapis’s exhibition Shame is an Object in Space at Annex M in Athens. Even though the paintings are melancholic in atmosphere, that doesn’t mean they automatically pull the viewer into a similar mood. In his first institutional solo exhibition, the Athens-based artist presents more than 50 paintings (each 40 x 50 cm, the typical small-panel format he likes to work on), along with additional works such as a projected slide, collages, and text fragments. In all of the paintings, the palette is muted; there are greens, blues, yellows, and greys, but they are mostly mixed, creating an introverted, sometimes gloomy atmosphere in the city- and landscapes that are depicted. The fact that most colors are tempered creates the impression that a light haze covers the scenes, gluing them together.

Kassapis paints the city: the landscape of buildings, concrete blocks, interiors, windows, wave breakers, street corners, and so on. But his work cannot be understood as observational painting in the sense that there is a direct relationship between seeing the motif and handling the brush. In his approach, painting is rather a vessel for indirect relationships. All motifs for this exhibition were collected from the internet, from stock photos and word-to-image searches, which brings in a certain aesthetic, as well as distortions and imperfections. They have the imprint of a certain era which for the artist is interesting to work with. For the human mind, picturing a site does not really work any differently. There is not one correct representation: The memory is colored by the moment the motif was perceived, the story embedding it, the knowledge attached to it, and circumstances like the weather or time of the day.

The individual paintings are without a narrative. You could argue that they work through emptiness. By having emptied out streets or shop interiors of people, furniture, and objects, the artist has made place for third-party imagination – a stage for the spectator. The palette and the slightly tilted compositions are the way the artist has delivered his imprint. Plus, with the internet searches, a machine was involved, which also influences color and the way flatness and perspective are constructed. These layers are presented together to the viewer as a new reality, the world of painting. This is not a city. The visitor can see the works as projection panels, as psychological landscapes, and find out if the tonalities are experienced as harmonious or dissonant, as familiar or remote.

In the spacious exhibition hall, all paintings are hung at eye level, as a frieze that draws an ongoing horizontal line. Yet in between the paintings, the white spaces differ, creating rhythms within a series, breaks in the line of looking. Three main chapters are articulated, one focusing on rooms and interiors, another on the city as a double (including pairs of paintings on the same motif), and the third on the notion of home. For the last chapter, the artist zoomed in on structuress that he knows from Palio Fario, the neighborhood where he grew up close to the port of Piraeus. On the beach, there used to be constellations of heavy concrete wave breakers, for the artist a meeting place with peers, and a place of imagination.        

δεν υπήρξε ποτέ η ευκαιρία. 2023. λάδι σε ξύλο

Kassapis’s specific palette, which at first glance is not very celebratory, reminds me of walking through a village in the evening, getting used to the darkness. The longer you spent outside, the more familiar you become with the evening palette, and the more details of the houses you discover. A similar principle works here. In some paintings, bright blue appears in contrast with the tempered light, but only at the fringes, as lines and contours of shapes that define the perspective. Little color accents can be found in multiple paintings, and define how the painting as a whole comes to life. The works are full of nuance, modulations, and they have a lot to enjoy once you are tuned in to the basic mood. 

Seeing all the details and the different ways of applying and layering paint creates an alertness in looking, as each time something new comes up. It seems that this work is a celebration of life, and also of where attentive observation can lead us. But this appreciation has been hard earned, first by the artist making the work step by step, and then by the viewer unfolding the work. What is shown always remains ambivalent in nature. Nothing is a given, and nothing can be taken for granted.

Hearing the artist discuss making the works, I was struck that he spoke about mistakes in rendering a certain space, which, in an odd way, brings us back to representation – as if there is some external standard that could measure how to paint these paintings correctly. But what would that be? Maybe representation is for Kassapis an underlying structure for a painting, something he can never entirely forget no matter how many detours he makes, no matter how well he knows that it is not about painting things “correctly” from observation. It is not unlike Willem de Kooning, who, even in his most abstract works, can still make you feel that there is a figure inside. Like De Kooning, Kassapis welcomes the mistakes as things that happen and can be valuable for the painting. False can be true. A line that wants to speak for itself instead of representing the author’s intention. In temperament, however, the paintings are unlike De Kooning, more akin instead to introverted and atmospheric paintings like those of Giorgo Morandi or Édouard Vuillard. Kassapis’s work is small and modest, but serious, full of nuance, and driven by the challenge to evoke an object-image we can experience as truthful, even if each painting is just a rendering of a certain number of perspectives, an articulation leaving out many other possibilities.

Text by Jurriaan Benschop, January 2026. Exhibition from 5 November 2025 till 1 February, 2026 at Annex M, (Megaro Mousiki) in Athens.

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Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Cycladic Art

marlene dumas exhibition museum of cycladic art athens

The Museum of Cycladic Art has been showing work by contemporary artists in the context of its collection since 2009. While in some cases, as with Brice Marden in 2022, this was based on recurrent references to the Greek landscape and antiquity in the artist’s work, the current show of Marlene Dumas, “Cycladic Blues,” hinges on no such immediate connection. What brings the more than thirty works by Dumas—one of them being a suite of seventeen drawings—into dialogue with the upright Cycladic sculptures of roughly five thousand years ago is that they can be regarded as expressions of and reflections on the vitality and mortality of human beings. 

Two recent works carry the signature of an artist who, at the age of seventy-two, is well aware that time could be growing short. Phantom Age, 2025, looks like a cutout human figure, but with a face whose shape has been made with poured paint, while in Old, 2025, the artist has used her brush to more precisely limn an aged face. Being old can make one feel “bad and sad,” writes Dumas in the catalogue, and at the opening she mentioned that she considers the show a reflective presentation. This pensive turn works out in her favor. The selection of works here is intimate, clear, and concise. 

Over her long career Dumas has explored many ways of applying paint, oscillating between a fast and loose manner that welcomes chance and a search for greater precision and a more dramatic expression of the figure. The dialogue between photography and painting has been central to her practice, and she often reinterprets historical motifs, as in the two works I mentioned, which are based on images of a Roman copy of an ancient Greek sculpture. In contrast to melancholic paintings about fading life such as Old, there are also vivid and bold works, among them Leather Boots, 2000, depicting a stripper posing provocatively, and a cheeky child portrait, Helena, 1992. Positioned among the paintings are sculptures from the museum collection, such as an approximately fifteen-inch-high female figurine from the Early Cycladic II period, with the typical crossed arms and lyre-shaped head, on which the nose is articulated most clearly. Contrary to Dumas’s work, the archaeological pieces show no emotion but impress through their containment and, you could say, their efficiency: With just a few lines and curves a human body is materialized, and a presence is established.

The large portrait Cycladic Blues, 2020, is Dumas’s most explicit reference to Cycladic aesthetics, giving it a twist with two dots for the eyes and a curved line for the mouth. The head looks rather cartoonish and the painting seems oversize for what it transmits, but other works make a more profound impression, among them Skull (as a House), 2007, which evokes the ambivalence of picturing oneself at home in death, as if in a future already present. The quiet Alfa, 2004, is a monumental portrait of a recumbent figure, pale as death. The painterly play between hard, defined lines and blurry areas perfectly supports the motif.

The exhibition’s curator, Douglas Fogle, calls Dumas’s work a metaphorical act of resistance, “an attempt to preserve the traces of our existence while acknowledging the movement of time toward an end point.” Yet I wonder if preservation is really what the artist has in mind. For her, the act of painting seems to serve as the best way to grasp life in its drama, dynamics, and ambivalence. It’s about being now, more than forever.

And what about the Cycladic sculptures, do they speak about mortality or eternity? Some were found in graves and must have played a commemorative role. Yet from their appearance it’s hard to say if they expressed mourning, heralded a festive event, or invoked the grace of the gods. What they do express is containment, simple grace, and dignity, and they do so without hinting, as Dumas does, at a personal narrative. They connect us to an age-old urge to create images of humankind, rather than of an individual to be remembered. 

This text by Jurriaan Benschop was first published in Artforum, November 2025. The exhibition took place from 5 June till 2 November, 2025.

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‘Things as They Are’

This exhibition at Jenny up the Hill on Syros spotlights the ambivalent nature of objects. Five artists draw attention to objects in their physical evidence, as they are. But surface and appearance are only the beginning. Looking at the works prompts us to question whether there is such a thing as a true nature of objects or materials.

In an era of high digital-image consumption, the artists in this exhibition invite us to regain interest in the physical qualities of the world that surrounds us. Touch and tactility are essential in connecting us with the environment and contributing to our understanding of life.

The motifs in the works of Lia Kazakou (Greece, 1980) at first seem clear and identifiable – fragments of clothing, the front view of a dress, a single sleeve, the folds around two buttons. Yet the way the artist portrays the items imbues them with ambiguity. The framing is very specific, with a “harsh” cut that highlights the abstraction of the work, the way the lines develop, or the shadows that are cast. Kazakou is based in Thessaloniki and regularly shows her work in exhibitions in Greece and Germany.

One of the paintings by Jenny Eden (United Kingdom, 1978) is called Hunebed – after the Dutch word for dolmen – as a way of suggesting a tomb-like chamber. The central area shows a ruptured space that could represent animal or human innards, a dissection opening out and tunneling backwards. Yet other ways of reading the figuration are also possible, an important quality of the painting. It never comes to rest, instead presenting a shape in motion, and it is full of contradictions in terms of psychology, being gentle and raw at once. Eden is a lecturer at the Manchester School of Art, and she is co-director of Oceans Apart, a gallery in Salford dedicated to contemporary painting.

For José Heerkens (The Netherlands, 1950), the horizontal has always been important in the composition of a painting, not just for orientation and balance, but also to evoke a sense of freedom and to create space to breathe. She is not so much interested in the illusion of depth (as through a horizon in a landscape), but rather in opening up the work to make it wide and generous. In her practice, the artist looks at how colors in different gradations or combinations work together on the surface. Heerkens works both on life-size canvases and on small-size panels like those in this exhibition. She aims to present color as purely as possible, without leading viewers to think about specific objects,figures, or landscapes. Colour: Free and Connected, an important retrospective of her work, was shown in the Kröller Müller Museum in The Netherlands in 2023.

As a painter, Paula Zarina-Zemane (Latvia, 1988) has an interest in landscape and the human figure, but at the same time, she values painting in a more abstract sense, as a play of forms and colors. The movement involved in the process of making a painting, with the speed it suggests and the depth or flatness it evokes, is part of what she wants to show. Both deliberate actions and accidents play a role. In recent years, Zarina has expanded her practice from canvas and wood panels to ceramics, further developing the oval forms we know from her paintings. Based in Riga, Zarina-Zemane has shown her works across Europe.

After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Davide Girardi decided to work some years for himself. He developed a body of work, mostly small and intimate in scale, from which two pieces are now presented for the first time in an exhibition. In Girardi’s approach collage and painting go hand in hand. He has been drawn to this method because it allows to create a tension between the destruction of an image and its reconstruction. In this process layering and depths are of high importance. The space created in his works can be read in different ways. Images like an interior or landscape are at the basis and create a sense of familiarity, yet their execution brings in an element of the unfamiliar or present a balance that is in the process of being challenged.

Things as They Are, curated by Jurriaan Benschop unfolds in two parts at Jenny up the Hill on Syros, Greece. Part 1 is on view from 18 July through 15 September, part 2 rom 18 September till 10 November, 2025.

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Salt in the Wound

Salt in the Wound takes you on a journey through Europe, to meet with contemporary artists such as Mirowslaw Balka, Michael Borremans, Bridget Riley and Sejla Kameric.

In a collection of essays, the author wonders how the work of these artists relates to the place where they work and live, and where they grew up. To what extend does the cultural background inform the imagination of these artists? While some artists reject such a connection, or want to leave it behind, others stress the importance of their environment and made it the focus of their work. For Salt in the Wound the author did not just visit artists in the so called art centers of Europe, but looked in regions that are considered periphery, such as Estonia, Latvia, Greece or Romania.

‘On the night of 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, private Norbert Bisky was fast asleep in his bed. He was doing his obligatory military service and was based in the countryside of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, north of Berlin. The next day his commander told him the news, but he could hardly believe it. Go tell someone else, for what could happen in a camp where nothing ever happened? Life in the GDR continued as usual, with private Bisky having to do his daily duties. After a few months, when the fall of the Wall was still denied in the provinces, he refused to stay any longer and illegally left for Berlin…’ (from the chapter Painting the GDR from his soul. Norbert Bisky).

Salt in the Wound was first published in Dutch at Van Oorschot (Zout in de wond); the English translation appeared at Garret Publications. The book can be ordered here.

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Mark Lammert in Berlin

Mark Lammert exhibition Revolutionssplitter Berlin

Over the past decade Mark Lammert has been regularly meeting with Rudolf Zwirner in his house in Berlin to draw the portrait of the man who created one of Germany’s most influential galleries. The sessions were, apart from an exchange of looks, also a stage for conversations around how art and the market have developed, for better or worse, from father to son. Do we get to see this in the drawings?

The portraits are, at first sight, modest, silent almost, as Lammert uses his charcoal with a gentle touch when it comes to directly portraying people. As a viewer you have to adjust to the low contrast first, to see the face appear and read its expression. But then you see something other than “art talk”: the portraits are glimpses of life in its awareness of mortality. We see a disappearing presence, some fear in the eyes, but also intimacy and proximity. The model trusted the one who took his image.

Two of the Zwirner portraits (out of more than 500!) are on view in the exhibition Revolustionssplitter (“Splinters of Revolution”) at the municipal Galerie Pankow in Berlin. The exhibition shows a number of Lammert’s own works on paper, but they are embedded within selections from his private collection of drawings by other artists, mainly French, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why this remarkable set up?

Let’s first look at Lammert’s own work. The artist is known as a painter and I consider him a great colorist, but for him every painting begins with drawing. The human figure has been his leading motif over forty-five years. Having lived in Berlin, both as a citizen of the GDR and of the reunified German Republic, he has witnessed human habits under diverse systems, along with the physical and psychological behavior that accompanied them. These collected insights come out in the fact that Lammert presents us figures existing in time, in space, and in motion. The dynamic nature of life is an essential underpinning of the work. And thus it makes sense that the visits to Rudolf Zwirner still continue; there is no such thing as one portrait that immortalizes a person. It is ongoing work, drawing from life, and drawing through life.

Why, then, did this artist bring his collection together with his own works in a contemporary art gallery? A lot of the exhibited works were made around the French revolution, in times of upheaval. Ingres, Delacroix, David, Valloton, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Bonnard, as well as various lesser-known artists, are all present with one or several drawings. It is a noteworthy fact that the works were acquired through the auction platform eBay, often for small money. Lammert’s meticulous research allowed him to discover works that dealers and collectors apparently overlooked or didn’t find interesting. (In a separate text, published in the German Lettre International summer issue of 2022, he made his case for the attributions.) Buying drawings without having prior confirmation of their provenance requires a certain courage. It puts weight on the eye, on stylistic understanding, on recognizing a hand and technique, and on the ability to sense the special quality of a work. Or, as Lammert puts it, one has to trust what makes the heart beat faster. To put forward this collation is a way of saying “this is what matters in drawing.” It might have been overlooked or ignored by the market, and it is certainly not fashionable, but it is highly contemporary in relevance, a source to stay close to. Look at it!

A recurring type of drawing in the exhibition is the portrait, such as the one attributed to Manet in which a woman of later age stares at the beholder, and it is hard to decide if she offers comfort or wants to share her sorrows. The face comes out in clear lines, strong contrasts. Lammert’s own portraits are, in comparison, piano in execution, and far less detailed. But they share the ambiguity regarding what time does to a human face and human existence, giving it an intensity that sometimes includes traits we might find unpleasant to look at.

Presenting drawings from the past is not an act of nostalgia here, but more a kind of archeology, finding the foundations that underlie the current day and presenting them as stones you can keep on building with. In an introduction to the exhibition J. D. Ingres (his work also appears) is quoted: when confronted with the maxim that artists should bring the new, and follow their time, Ingres strongly disagreed: “Why, if my time is wrong.”

Why embrace narratives or aesthetic conventions if you feel they are flawed? Here the exhibition becomes political again. Being relevant as an artist might as well mean that you need not react to the topics that are discussed in dominant discourse, but instead focus on phrasing a different story. This seems especially thought-provoking and helpful in the context of our current political climate, where false narratives are aggressively propagated by authoritarian actors. When such narratives lead into the darkness, or distract (as they do) from what really matters, the artist’s role may be to recognize that, and choose a different path instead. Mounting your work alongside overlooked drawings you know to be genuine and significant might be just a small act of resistance to contemporary norms. Yet, as an act of holding on to what you know really matters, it sets an example of independent thinking—something we will dearly need in the days to come.

This is an abbreviated version of a text that was published in the section Artseen of The Brooklyn Rail, February 2025. The exhibition took place from November 5, 2024 till January 26, 2025 at Galerie Pankow, Berlin.

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Maria Spyraki in Athens

The palette of Maria Spyraki’s series Non-Cognitive Memory Structures (2020–24) belongs to nature as we know it from trees, stones, sky, and earth. The browns, grays, and greens, mixed with gradations of white and black, form an easy pathway into the paintings. They are balanced colors, not loud, and if we imagine the work placed in a landscape, it would probably blend in. Yet we are not looking at actual landscape paintings. The works are earthbound and rooted, but also light, conceptual, and mindful. How do these aspects fit together on the same surface?

Once we shift the attention from color to form and to composition, we cannot immediately identify a clear-cut scene or subject matter. Now the paintings look less familiar. Some circular forms resemble pebbles, or are they bubbles? There might be trees, with fog, but none of this is really confirmed. Associations easily shift. More generally, one could say that organic-looking shapes meet geometric forms. Just as an intuitive way of working meets with a systematic approach to painting. A grid shows up in several of the works and is key to keeping things in place. In painting III the grid is prominent, the main motif, while in painting IV it is almost invisible, hidden in a haze of color. In VII it comes out in dots. The grid cuts the surface into compartments, like a building that has multiple windows, each containing life with differences in style and appearance, yet all made of the same substance. The structure allows for multiplicity within a single painting.

Some shapes seem animal- or humanlike but have not manifested fully as any identifiable creature; in other cases, the shapes look more like plants. We see life when it is still embryonic and fluid, in growth. On the other side of the spectrum, some forms seem to be the result of a process of aging, form losing its substance and appearance. In the center of IX, a mummified figure is floating. Mummies relate to ancient times, pay respect to a valuable past life. Yet the artist does not tell a history about a certain person or place. Rather, she has collected impressions, observations, memories, processing them in the act of painting. She has given all that she has found a home within the structures she has laid out in the paintings.

Some forms are reluctant to identify themselves, others are more explicit. If we reflect on what these paintings are about, it is the process of collecting and accommodating experiences that comes to the fore, rather than the specific forms the experiences take. It is about mapping out layers of memory, offering cross sections of life, yet in an intuitive way. The artist paints from life – not just from observation, but also in a deeper sense, in looking into the dynamics of growth, of birth and death, and of how time defines and changes the appearance and experience of things. This can explain the different layers and compartments in the paintings, each being occupied.

The paintings are like a motherboard containing memories as they are stored and stacked inside of us. It is not about personal memory here, not about specific things that happen in our own lives, but rather about how collective psychology, biology, geology – the whole environment as it has developed, really – leaves an imprint on every human being, defining limits and possibilities. The work is not solely focusing on life’s outward beauty and appearance, but also paying honor to its layered and complex inner reality, things that are inescapable. We see ambivalent forms that could indicate life fading away, or the start of something that is just about to appear.

Between 2022 and 2024 I visited Maria Spyraki several times in her studio in Athens, while she was working on the Non-Cognitive Memory Structures. The text is a result of discussing the series of paintings with the artist. Spyraki was trained as an architect but switched to painting which is now her main practice.

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Waarom een schilderij werkt

boek cover Waarom een schilderij werkt

In dit boek wordt het werk van tientallen hedendaagse schilders voorgesteld. Daarbij komt steeds de vraag aan de orde: Waarom werkt dit schilderij? Op wat voor manier heeft het betekenis en kan het overtuigen? Het zijn vragen die onder meer voortkomen uit de behoefte om te kunnen navigeren in het veelvormige landschap van de schilderkunst van nu, waarin verschillende stijlen en houdingen naast en door elkaar bestaan.

Enerzijds lijkt tegenwoordig alles te kunnen, en is het aanbod van kunst groot, maar anderzijds vindt niemand echt dat alles kan. Bij kunst horen noties over wat top is en talent, over wat progressief is, kritisch of ter zake, of wat aan kracht verloren heeft. Daarbij heerst in de kunst, net als in andere domeinen, een strijd om aandacht; velen willen gezien wor- den of iets tonen, en zowel kunsteigene als afgeleide motieven spelen daarbij een rol.

Waarom een schilderij werkt gaat, behalve over de vraag hoe we naar schilderijen kijken en hoe ze werken, over de vraag hoe we over kunst schrijven en spreken. Wil taal over kunst iets betekenen, dan moet ze ermee in evenwicht zijn, niet topzwaar of overdreven, maar passend bij de kunst die aan de orde komt. Er zijn zichtbare aspecten die kunnen worden aangekaart, zoals het beeldmotief, de compositie, het kleurgebruik en de manier waarop de verf wordt aangebracht. Maar er zijn ook onzichtbare factoren: de drijfveren, het wereldbeeld, de herkomst of de visie van de kunstenaar. In dit boek worden deze aspecten onderzocht en met elkaar in verband gebracht. Het gaat om wat je ziet in schilderijen, maar ook om de houding en de ideeën die erachter liggen.

Het boek gaat in op het werk van Rezi van Lankveld, Louise Bonnet, Peter Doig, Helmut Federle, Beverly Fishman, Daniel Richer, Victoria Gitman, Martha Jungwirth, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Kerry James Marshall, Lara de Moor (coverbeeld), Marc Mulders, Kaido Ole, Paula Rego, Jessica Stockholder, Anna Tuori, Matthias Weischer en vele anderen.

Waarom een schilderij werkt is verschenen bij uitgeverij van Oorschot Het boek kost 25 euro en is verkrijgbaar in Nederlandse en Vlaamse boekwinkels, bijvoorbeeld bij Copyright in Gent, Boekhandel Robert Premsela in Amsterdam, Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Kunstmuseum Den Haag en Broese in Utrecht. Het kan ook hier via deze website besteld worden.

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The Nature of Abstraction

exhibition beyond the line with works by sean scully and stefan gierowski

An exhibition in Warsaw brings together the work of Sean Scully and Stefan Gierowski.

In 1945, the year that Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Stefan Gierowski, aged 20, enrolled at the art academy in Krakow, making his first steps into the arts. In the subsequent years, he navigated stylistic possibilities, looking with interest at avant-garde art movements from the West, but also facing the demands as phrased by the communist regime in post-war Poland. Art should be for the people, an idea that Gierowski would not disagree with per se, but how it should look was another question.


Scully and Gierowski grew up in different contexts in western and eastern Europe (Scully also went to the US, which influenced his painting), but as their respective artistic lives developed, both came to embrace abstract painting. They never met in person, but a recent exhibition at the Fundacja Stefana Gierowskiego in Warsaw brought the works of the two together, creating a dialogue (posthumously, for Gierowski) Beyond the line, as the title of the show indicated. It turned out to be an exhibition that made you think about the nature of abstraction and how it can relate to our present lives.


Curator Joachim Pissaro speaks in his introduction about the abstract movement, but one might wonder if it is a movement (or style) at all. Painters may use the same type of geometric forms, squares, lines, or color bands, yet works can have different motivations and impacts. In the case of Scully and Gierowski, there are such shared formal interests as the line and its widening to a band or other shape. They both also work with just a handful of elements to make a painting. But the temperaments underneath, and how the forms come out and take life on the surface, seem quite different. If two people wear the same type of coat, it does not mean they will look alike.


Scully has noted that an abstract painting cannot really be for or against something. One cannot appropriate an abstract painting to illustrate something based on subject matter or narrative. For Gierowski this must have been a critical advantage, as it created distance to the official socialist realist style that the political establishment in Poland identified with. The painting spoke in other ways – through surface, paint application, color, light, and sense of balance. But maybe even more importantly, art for him was about something you cannot really grab, an abstract quality in the sense of “not tangible.”


The absence of what can be named or identified has made abstract painting suitable for spiritual or mystical readings. Just as in religion, where the essence, or God, cannot be depicted, the very essence of an abstract painting cannot be extracted. It resides within the painting. That is, if it works at all. This does not mean that abstract painting leans automatically towards the spiritual. It seems to be a matter of where the artist directs his attention. A work can also be focused on optics and perception, or it can present a structural model aimed at understanding the world through the metaphor of forces at play. Throughout the exhibition, such options present themselves, activating the question in what capacity does a painting work, and also, when exactly does it come alive. The answers keep changing.


For Scully, as Pissaro describes in the catalog, art was a respite from early on, offering beauty and calm in a turbulent, poor, and streetlife reality. When Scully attended school, the encounter with art presented an escape in the best sense of the word, a way out of trouble, offering moments of recuperation and hope for something else. This interest developed and manifested later on in Scully’s work, for instance in the chapel he decorated for the Hortensia Herrero collection in Valencia, a sacred space with a combination of paintings, glass, color, and light. This aspect of Scully’s work is certainly not the only one – the artist is also earthbound, relating to the color and shapes of a building or of landscapes, enjoying the physical existence and structures he observes, as can be sensed in works such as Taped Painting Cream and Black (1975), where strips of tape create a woven pattern on the surface, and Grey Wall (2019), which suggests a stacking of stones or otherwise constructive elements. Scully’s paintings seem to be the result of working through complexities to attain a sense of order and simplicity, and this feels like an important part of what the artist has to offer. He has cleared things up.


In Gierowski’s case, it seems that part of the work starts from an interest in how color relations work out, how they might or might not create the illusion of space, or evoke a certain lightness. More than Scully, Gierowski stretches his palette from the deepest dark to the very bright, including some loud and cheeky colors. Seeing the works he made over a half a century, it struck me how fresh and crisp some of them look, like Painting DCCXXVIII (1998), for example, while others appear more dated, or belong to what was “going around” at the time Gierowski made them. There are quite a few cases where he transcends his time, which gives his work great appeal. Abstraction, it seems, offered him a ticket outside his time and cultural context, and also across borders, even if he did not have much possibility to travel.


Gierowski appears to have been an analytical and cautious painter who carefully studied modern movements such as Futurism and Surrealism, taking what fit his interests in how to create movement with only abstract forms, or how to create space through color contrasts. There is a lot of attention in the handwork, the brushstroke, the treatment of surfaces, and the construction of the painting. Yet all that seems to happen with the objective of making paintings that at some point forget all about their physical existence and take off, so to speak, getting wings and becoming metaphysical reflections.


The different temperaments of the painters come out when you focus on how differently the light shines in their works, Scully’s more muted and melancholic, and staying closer to natural colors, Gierowski’s looking for the whole spectrum. In terms of brushstroke and speed, on the other hand, Scully has more bravado and brings in grand gestures. Both painters created a discipline that works with a set of formal limitations (which is one aspect of their abstraction), within which they expand, finding freedom and infinity. Scully often works in series, exhausting a certain motif through repetition, whereas Gierowski was less inclined to series but committed to making a different painting with just a little shift in approach, changing only one of the parameters.


Paradoxically, in the end it does not matter that much if the paintings of the two artists look similar in terms of composition, or if they use the same shapes. It is not at that level where they merge in the mind or experience of the viewer. It turns out that the abstraction is a quality situated inside the work, more so than being an outer identifier. It is something that might make the painting shine, or transmit a feeling of unity, or lift the spirit; it cannot really be fixed or pointed at. And it is not something that comes out successfully in every painting; it has to be conquered or met with by the artist. The real mystery is when an abstract painting transcends its formal appearance, and appears relevant to life. The whole universe might be in there, and yet you cannot prove one thing.

This text was first published on Arterritory on 28 November 2024.