Panos Profitis, represented by The Breeder gallery, is the winner of the Art Athina prize for young artist for 2024, which is awarded for the third year and aims to support artistic creation as a fair institution.

The prize, which consists of a solo presentation of the artist’s work at the MOMus-Alex Mylonas Museum within 2025, was announced on Friday 20 September by the member of the evaluation committee and representative of MOMus, Thouli Misirloglou.

According to the terms of participation in the institution, visual artists up to 45 years old, who live and work in Greece and are nominated by the gallery that represents them, where they have held at least one solo exhibition. The institution is an initiative of the Panhellenic Association of Art Galleries, while Art Athina is collaborating for the third time with the MOMus-Museum Alex Mylonas, one of the five museums of the Metropolitan Organization of Thessaloniki’s Visual Arts Museums (MOMus).

The five-member evaluation committee for the award consisted of:

Daphne Vitali, Art Historian and Curator of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST)

Panos Giannikopoulos, Art Historian and Curator

Thouli Misirloglou, Art Historian and Artistic Director of MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Museum of Contemporary Art

Yannis Bolis, Art Historian and Head of the Department of Contemporary Sculpture, MOMus-Alex Mylonas Museum

Irini Orati,Art Historian and Artistic Director of the Ioannis F. Costopoulos Foundation.

According to the jury’s judgement, Panos Profitis’ work develops with exceptional coherence and is distinguished by the multiplicity of his artistic means – compositions with ready-made objects, sculptures, installations in space and performances – and experimentation, its theoretical-research framework as reflected in the breadth of its references, which cover an extensive spectrum (from the ancient world and mythology to Dante’s Divine Comedy, literature, folklore and history, everyday realities and structures). In an intensely theatrical way, he creates multidimensional environments in which anthropomorphic elements are combined with mechanical ones, while the performative gesture, the concept of time, the dimension of space and constant shifts play a decisive role. His award enables him to present his work in the space of a museum, the MOMus-Museum Alex Mylonas, which welcomes, with pleasure, the artist.

Bio

Panos Profitis lives and works in Athens. He grew up in a small village at the foot of Mount Parnassus. He holds an MA in Visual Arts (2016) from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, with a focus on site-specific arts/installations, and a BA from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2013). For his Master’s degree he received a scholarship from NEON (2015-2016), and for his Master’s thesis he received the Hugo Roelandt Award from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Hugo Roelandt Endowment and Objectif Antwerp.