Zoumboulakis gallery presents the group show titled “muddy mood”, curated by Apostolis  Artinos. 

Participating Artists

Vanessa Anastasopoulou, Dionisis Christofilogiannis Christos Delidimos, Dionisis Kavallieratos,  Konstantinos Ladianos, Natalia Manta, Maro Michalakakos, Dimitris Neveskiotis, Aliki Palaska, Vasilis  Papageorgiou, Nikos Tranos, Giorgos Tserionis, Vasilis Zografos. 

Vanessa Anastasopoulou

Artinos writes in his text: “The art of ceramics could be characterised by what Vilém Flusser  has so aptly described as “the voracity of the hands”. For the gesture that stimulates the clay  on the potter’s wheel or bench is what exposes the material to the setting of the artist’s  images. A material which, like any other, resists and succumbs, and the more it abandons  itself to this twofold movement the more it results in formal outcomes that excite and  subjugate it. The works are manmade, the works are moulded by a twin-natured platonic  gesture which inscribes the object onto the immateriality of the concept, and vice-versa.  Form is the hybrid derived from such a dialectic.  

Maro Michalakakou

muddy mood; a raw and orgiastic mood starts the creation. The art of ceramics has  something playful about it, with every move revealing forms. All we have to do is expand  them, multiply them, continue to play. After all, this is what makes play fascinating—its  endless manifestations. The act of shaping clay keeps exploring this potential, its creative  scope. We are at the beginning of pleasure. The spontaneity of this practice, which is in no  way unconnected from experience and knowhow, does not stop at the allure but manifests  itself in its distinctions, as the ceramist recognises the visual forms and then subjects them  to the span and the distinctions of his or her art. Herein lies the difference from children’s  model-making: the artist gives in to the allure but remains constantly suspicious of it.

Vasilis Papageorgiou

Ceramics, even in its traditional guises when it served its utilitarian truth, always  found ways to expose an uncanny trace—as in the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic jugs,  for example. A traditional jug formed with such traits goes beyond its utilitarian nature to  espouse another role, another creed within everyday experience. More than formal, this  deviation served an additional meaning, another scene of the truth. The artwork,  programmed in the horizon of its difference, spears also to be its most ideal fulfilment. In this  way the uncanny, even in the most familiar aspects it can assume, becomes the  verisimilitude of the work, its uninvited relief, even if it is barely traced on its surface.  

Konstantinos Ladianos

The painted and ceramic works by thirteen artists in the exhibition, muddy mood  demonstrate the span of their differences. The delicate ceramic elements that rest upon the  vases of Vanessa Anastasopoulou allude to fragility itself as it settles like ash on the  glories of life. The mystical sculpture of Natalia Manta comes from a symbolic universe  which is totally hers. On an oversized jug and a hand whose dimensions exceed the actual  human scale, Christos Delidimos incorporates reliefs of a distinct ambiguity which point to  ritualistic objects from long-forgotten pagan cults.

Dionysis Kavallieratos

 The legs of birds of prey can be  recognised in the ceramic creations of Maro Michalakakos; one of her works, Lovers, is a  comment on desire and the im-possibility of the relationship. The drawings of Dimitris  Neveskiotis are transferred from the computer screen onto the ceramic surface of his vases  to attest to a new resilience, that of the digital script which reigns supreme. The vases of  Giorgos Tserionis, with their fluid forms, defined by elements beyond their identity; the  fragmental compositions of Aliki Palaska, with their unorthodox joinings and their twisted  representations; and the representations of Western ceramic decorations on the translucent  veils in the painting of Vasilis Zografos.

Giorgos Tserionis

 In a humorous and critical mood, the ceramic  sculptures of Dionisis Kavallieratos illustrate a series of outcast—yet also emblematic, in a  way—figures of our contemporary world. The forms of the ceramic sculptures of  Konstantinos Ladianos seem to have come out of his paintings to take up a new narrative  challenge as they become three-dimensional. The ceramic paintings of Vasilis  Papageorgiou are steeped in painterly atmospheres, even if these atmospheres stem from  the body of clay itself, in this case. The ceramic sculptures of Nikos Tranos, archetypal  constructions that incrementally unfold towards the sky—or do they come from it? Also, the  wall-mounted ceramic compositions of Dionisis Christofilogiannis come from the imagery of a tradition at once indeterminate and familiar. All of these mean something, and again all  of these conceal something, this secret language of art”. 

Aliki Palaska

The gallery would wish to thank: Bernier / Eliades Gallery, Can Christina Androulidaki Gallery, Callirrhoë Gallery, Kalfayan Galleries, Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery.

Duration: 5 – 28 June 2025

Zoumboulakis Gallery,  Kolonaki Square 20

Opening Hours: Τue., Thur. & Fri.. 11.00 -20.00

Wedn.. & Sat. 11.00 –15.00

Sundays & Mondays closed