ROMA GALLERY is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Estate of Haris Gavrilos (1957-1995). The exhibition “Closer” is the third solo exhibition organized after the artist’s untimely death and includes works that highlight his research on the language of painting. Gavrilos does not study painting as a medium but as an entity and a fact, a possibility. His art is experiential without being personal: “I paint me. But… I don’t see me”, he writes in an essay on his work published in the magazine Double Image (May 1985).

The painting of Haris Gavrilos is erotic and dreamy. Familiar with the writings of Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade, the artist sought to transcend the boundaries of representation through eroticism and dreams. His large-scale paintings celebrate physicality, sometimes overtly and sometimes suggestively. Emphasizing emotional memory and the interplay of light and darkness, Gavrilos attempts – in his own words – to find balance in space through different times.

The forms he paints and draws are spectral, embryonic, airy. “Indefinable and fluid at first, these forms are ultimately clear references to other archetypal forms with extensions in space-time, the deep past or the distant future,” the artist states. Indeed, the forms painted by Gavrilos are ectoplasmic, disembodied like those in El Greco’s paintings. Sometimes they resemble burnt matches, small and vaporized, and sometimes they are invertebrate, malleable like bent trees.

In Gavrilos’ painting the figures are courting, sleeping and breathing. If in the works of the 1980s his figures look like shadows, alluding to the schematic forms of ancient sculpture, in his latest paintings they are obviously more shaped: now they have faces and distinct features, they embrace each other suffocatingly and dream incessantly, and even at different times. It is thus implied that Gavrilos’ work is based on the painter’s erotic play with painting itself.

Haris Gavrilos was born in Tripoli, Arcadia in 1957 and passed away in Athens in 1995. He studied painting and drawing at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1978-1983, Dimitris Mytaras and Demosthenes Kokkinidis Workshop) and attended courses in stage design at the same school (1982-83, Vassilis Vassiliadis Workshop). During his life he held three solo exhibitions: Psychiko Art Gallery (1985), Medusa Art Gallery (1992) and Olga Georgantea Gallery (1993). In 2003, the gazonrouge gallery organized a solo exhibition of his work. He participated in the following group exhibitions: A selection from the Vorres Museum, touring exhibition in the framework of “Athens – European Capital of Culture” (1985), Newer quests – The adventure of the image and its undoing, Pierides Gallery (1985), Tradition and avant-garde in Greek art, Pierides Gallery, Patras (1986), First Document, Art Magazine “Double Image”, Athens (1986), Tradition and avant-garde in Greek art, Pierides Gallery, Thessaloniki (1987), Ileana Tounta Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens (1989), Contemporary Greek Painting: Vlassis Frissiras Collection, Pierides Gallery, Glyfada and Cultural Centre of the Municipality of Athens, Athens (1991). His works are in private collections (Iolas, Vorres, Pierides, Antoniou, Frissiras) and in the Rhodes Art Gallery. In 2022, the Athens Municipal Gallery hosted the retrospective exhibition “Haris Gavrilos: Arcadia”, curated by Christoforos Marinos.

Exhibition Curator: Christoforos Marinos

Opening: Thursday, 25.1.2024, 19:00

Exhibition Duration: 25.1.2024 – 27.2.2024

Admissions Free