Maria Polyzoidou

AD gallery presented the second solo show of Maria Polyzoidou.

Exhibition duration: March 6 – April 20, 2013

"The artist in this body of work systematizes a method that allows the historical and pictorial event to coexist in a unique result. From the very beginning she defines herself simultaneously as the first viewer of the historical event and the painted image. She handles the distance between these two points as a natural variable size, allowing them to coincide. Bridging the gap between the representation and the represented, her works lead the viewer to face a real image and a painting approach, in both of which reality is a part of and not a reference.

This special approach to painting is contrary to nowadays prevailing trends of the archive’s representation: on one hand a photorealism whose starting point lies in the handling of archives as a sort of political commentary and on the other hand a painting genre that gives emphasis in the personal gesture of the artist that produces images beyond the reality of the represented event.

If in the first case the viewer is turned into a false witness by having the false sense of being present in a historical reality, in the second case he is placed in a gap between narration and the narrative method on one hand and the event per se on the other, experiencing the event only partially. Maria Polyzoidou creates through her new works a space where the viewer can negotiate his presence or absence from the route of history, the creation of image and the construction of meaning, allowing him to exist as an active viewer of a “real painting”. " --Alexios Papazacharias

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