Citronne Gallery Athens - Patriarchou Ioakim 19

CITRONNE Gallery opens its exhibition program for summer 2021 with the solo exhibition JOURNEY by Cris Giannakos. The exhibition is to open on Saturday, June 12 and will run through September 11. A renowned, groundbreaking artist, Cris Giannakos is a member of the Greek Diaspora who lives and works in New York.

The CITRONNE Gallery exhibition features landmark paintings from 1980 – 2020, works 'of the pandemic' as a response to covid, and two new works of 2021—two installations created specifically for this show.

"In this exhibition at Citronne, Tatiana and I were able to pull together 4 decades of my art practice from 1981 to 2020 drawings done in reaction to Covid and 2 new 2021 floor structures to be fabricated and installed in the gallery. We titled the show “JOURNEY", denoting a passage through different works done in different mediums at different times. When you view them, no matter in which medium or time, you always feel evidence of the hand and my concerns for architecture, ancient Greek sites and engineering. But my work consistently circles around ramps, large structures in an environment, a conceptual idea marrying a concrete form to a specific site." (Cris Gianakos)

The basis of the work of Cris Giannakos is a research field around a geometrical axis. He crosses space with the imaginary extensions created by a geometric script in the environment—an approach he adopted from the outset in his artistic career. He also crosses time, as he is drawn to the character of ancient art, to classical architecture and above all to the ratio, i.e. its relation to geometry.

In the early ’90s he began to alter photographs of ancient artworks as well as those of archaeological sites. His works often constitute a rereading of ancient sites and monuments, always on the basis of key geometric shapes-symbols. He overlays the photos of archaeological sites, historic places and statues with geometric shapes which, to him, reflect the fundamental spirit of civilization in its various manifestations.

Yet in his recent "Pandemic Series” and “Dystopia Series”, geometry and the ratio, the structured world, is reversed. The site within space does not vanish but gets more difficult as it loses its distinctive elements. Blue or red, a dystopia, an uneasiness dominates as the symptom of a major reversal. These are works stemming from the subconscious and characterized by a gestural visual script—an explainable deviation from the artist's usual fare. The impression generated by these works is one of disorder, in full dissonance with the familiar and soothing order. It reflects a world that has suddenly lost its pace, its motion, its proportion and cohesion.

The exhibition JOURNEY is the third solo show to be organized by Citronne for Cris Giannakos. It comes after another solo event at the gallery in 2008 and an exhibition at the Archaeological Museum of Poros in 2013.