The solo exhibition of Egkrateia Roumpou, entitled mitra, is opening on Tuesday, 20th November, 2018, at 20.00 in Yeni Tzami.
The visual artist Egkrateia Roumpou presents paintings and an installation, with centerpiece the Tree, which gives body and communicates her concerns, dominating the exhibition space.
Dirt is piling, burdening soul and body, a tree which grows, darkens, becomes coarse and rigid, stretching its roots and branches, expanding without control. The consciousness of the burden triggers the agony for purification, the return to the start, the birth, the mitra -the Greek word for womb-. Strenuous processes, which the artist calls internal immersion. On the road of redeeming return, texts referring to the same anxiety, Dante, S. Beckett and S. Kane, invade Roumpou’s work and imprint appears in many different forms. The artist intervenes in the texts painterly, adding and removing words and phrases, a free write, an écriture automatique, in a procedure of meditation and salvation, purification through painting.
As for Roumpou, this is all about “… a journey of pursuit, self-awareness, catharsis, Dante’s inferno? A painful route, where the words and images, invite the viewer in a repetitive escape. They create breaches. They give birth to the need to immerse under the surface. These journeys, this quest are recorded with pictures, with words, with color, and marks on the painting surface, as well as with an installation. Thoughts, emotions, and experiences, the others and myself in a visual co-existence.”
From the Press Release.
