Kallos • Group Exhibition
The Historic Archives and Museum of Hydra has the honour and the pleasure to invite you at the opening of the exhibition “Kallos”, Wednesday, 4 May 2016, at 7.00 p.m.
Curated by: Iris Kritikou
Costas Ananidas, Angelos Antonopoulos,
Hariton Bekiaris, Maria Filopoulou, J.Joshua Garrick, Irini Gonou, Afrodite Liti, Stelios Panagiotopoulos, Angelos Papadimitriou, Panayiotis Pasantas, Dimitris Skourogiannis, Praxitelis Tzanoulinos, Alexis Veroucas, Marios Voutsinas
Exhibition duration: 4 May – 26 June 2016
Visiting hours: Daily 9:00-16:00
Information: The Historic Archives and Museum of Hydra
tel: 22980 52355, 54142 / fax: 22980 52355
email: mail@gak-ydras.att.sch.gr / www.iamy.gr
Kallos and other misfortunes
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny
Socrates
The group exhibition “KALLOS” was specially designed for the Historic Archives Museum of Hydra. It is an aesthetic and conceptual attempt to approach the archetypal definition of the word kallos (=beauty) – as used by Plato, Aristotle, and later on the neoplatonic Plotinus – with the contribution of 14 contemporary visual artists.
The beginning of the idea was the photographic work of the American artist J. Joshua Garrick who has developed an undying friendship with Greece, and who recently presented the exhibition “Seeking the Ancient Kallos” at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens – which this year celebrates 150 years of existence. The exhibition’s subjects are sculptures presented in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and the aim is to view the often unseen “mainland” of each sculpture. Printed on processed DiBond aluminium, Garrick’s photographs with their almost tactile depth “discover” the Greek sculptures ab initio. A part of this unit is now presented in Hydra, in discourse with recent, as well as older sculptures, with common point of reference the idea of kallos, depicted in its established classical version, or even deconstructed and restructured.
“Kallos”, an exceptional concept offered to us conceived and articulated by the brightest version of the ancient Greek thinking, encapsulates a long algorithm of difficult questions: life and death, youth and senility, vigour and humility, lust, love and pain, joy and loss, victory and defeat, mortality and immortality. Raising “ecstasy, exhilarating agony, desire and love, as well as a quivering expectation”.
“For the Greeks”, Albert Camus writes in his Notebook in 1948, “Beauty is a starting point. For a European, however, it is an unattainable goal”. “However”, he concludes, “I am not modern. My own realm belongs with certitude on this earthly plain; this beautiful world, outside which I can find nothing. For this reason, beauty is tragic, because it remains ephemeral, as is the body, which contains it. Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
This short-lived yet ideal, for its precious contents, small-scale Sculpture Gallery of “KALLOS”, is composed by personal deposits made by dear friends reproaching with their work the fragility of the virtual erotic memory of beauty and comforting the ephemeris of its mortal nature, even when they seem taunting. Through the work of art “that will last forever”, they map a new “Landscape of Beauty”, on which Alexander Nehamas notes: “I think of the beauty of the artwork as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an art that speaks to our desire.”
Iris Kritikou
Exhibition curator