“The paintings created by the international artist Anna Achilleos-Staeubli with a burnt-in technique, attempt to spell and signify symbolically and plastically the sea as a Homeric word. As a shell and living palimpsest of magical content. As a triumphant primordial source of life, as a passage of culture and communication. To understand and sing it as Sea small and as ocean, as myrrh magic, as resource and as point inexhaustible, as giddiness and serenity.

To measure it mentally, by taking us on a journey through the Mediterranean of the entire Greek civilization, from the Ionian and the Aegean, to the Libyan and the Black Sea. To capture it as the primordial raw material that permeates and defines so many of the precious exhibits of the National Archaeological Museum.

In an original installation, the sea as a mottled organic body, as a rainbow of innumerable shades of blue and as a shell of mysterious creatures and myths, is presented triumphantly, without the need for narrative means. Painted with a fascinating spectrum of different and unexpected hues and tones that go back to ancient Greek painting, it is treated by the painter as a primitive find and creates a mythical plain of different psychographic moments and perpetual oceanic coordinates.

Driven by her compelling need to convey the grandeur of colour, the rhythm of shape, the desire to touch, the inexhaustible depth and breadth, Anna Achilleos Staeubli has been dedicated for decades to the inherent difficulties of technique and the exciting possibilities of the art of burning. Discovering the multiple coatings of history, the expressionistic thrill of fluid and improvised coloring, abrasive materiality, subtle light shading and expressive gesture, she sought in her studies and subsequent career the possibility of a new execution with unmistakable technique and transcendent artistic quality. Approaching this dominant timeless Greek symbol in a short, inventive and simple way, Anna Achilleos Staeubli creates from the very beginning an extraordinary simple and densely tangible pictorial semiotics that captivates the viewer”, notes the curator of the exhibition Iris Kritikou.

Bio

Anna Achilleos Staeubli was born in Paphos, Cyprus in 1958. She has been active in painting between Pafos, Bern and Athens since 2000.

He graduated from the Cyprus School of Guides where he studied History of Art, History, Archaeology, Byzantine Art, Fauna, Flora and Geology.

He attended art courses in Bern, Switzerland, Athens and Boston, USA.

Inspired by the sea, nature, flowers, mining and Byzantine art, she creates works of Enigmatic art – an ancient technique using beeswax and pigments, acrylics and oil.

Anna Achilleos Staeubli has held solo exhibitions and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Museums, Art Foundations and Art Institutions as well as in Galleries in Switzerland, France, Greece and Cyprus.

Her works belong to museums, public and private collections in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Spain, Malta, Greece and Cyprus.

Opening Night: Friday 7 June 2024, at 19.30 -22.00.

Μarginalia Gallery

Duration: 7 June– 29 June 2024

Curated by: Iris Kritikou