Christina Mitrentse

“MINUMENTAL”

Opening: Wednesday 23/03, hours 18:00-22:00

Duration until 07/05/2022

Exhibition curator: Christoforos Marinos

Christina Mitrentse‘s second solo exhibition at a.antonopoulou.art gallery starts on Wednesday 23 March.

The artist, educator and curator, who lived and worked in London for 20 years, presents for the first time in Athens a selection of her series of graphite, paint and collage drawings, as well as sculptural works as part of her ongoing project Add To My Library, launched in 2011. This international project, which focuses on the relationship between art and books, is part of a series of exhibitions that have been held in galleries and education centres, in the UK and Europe.

Mitrentse’s exhibition, entitled Minumental, coincides with the theme of this year’s ICOM conference (“The Power of Museums”), which will take place in Prague next August. This series of large-scale and smaller works on paper features contemporary art museums from around the world, including the new TateModern, EMST, Acropolis Museum, WIELS and MACBA, along with monuments of the past such as Stonehenge. Here the book acts as a metonym for both location and content.

For Mitrentse, drawing is much more than a means of representation. It serves her heterotopic practice as a tool for critical investigation, mapping space and ultimately constructing discrete worlds. In this complex universe, shaped by painting, silkscreen, sculpture, performance and installation, drawing functions as a transference that constantly opens up visual possibilities.

Mitrentse’s works confirm Joseph Beuys’ view that drawing is “a special kind of thinking”. It is a highly charged kind of conceptual drawing that eschews visceral gestures in order to make the viewer contemplate the “text” of culture in crisis. The artist has also emphasized that she is interested in how “time can be captured or represented using the grey scale derived from pencil and graphite” and the reconstruction of time through “the image of bricks in world heritage sites and institutions.” Mitrentse describes this design as a “tactile shift”, facilitated through the crushing of the colour pastel into powder. Each design can function as a domestic “shelf”. These are the traces of an attempt to redesign the cultural institution: the rigid structure of the EMST becomes a ziggurat ISBN.

Christina Mitrentse has exhibited her artworks in 20 solo exhibitions and over 200 group exhibitions in galleries, museums and public spaces, including: the Tate Modern, The Royal Academy, ICA London, Liverpool Biennial UK, XV Biennale de Mediterranea, 2nd Bodrum International Biennial Turkey, NDSM-Werf Amsterdam, MOMUS State Museum of Modern Art, Jewish Museum of Greece, Hackney Museum, Nadine Feront Gallery, Dalla Rosa Gallery, The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Central Booking NY, The Centre for the Book Arts NY, San Francisco Centre for the Book, California, Drop -Hiroshima, Japan, Rise Berlin, Helsinki Contemporary Gallery. Her work has been described in major publications such as The Word Is Art, Thames & Hudson and Unselfmarked. Her works are held in major private and public collections such as the WWW foundation, MOCA London, Senate House, Book Arts UWE, LCC, Women’s Art Library Goldsmiths University, Book Art Centre NY, the National Library in Baghdad, the Jewish Museum of Greece, Fine Art Society London, Greenwich Council, Sill Library Bath, Mol’s collection Holland, Tate Archive, Penguin Collectors Society, GriechischeKultustiftung Berlin, M. Altenman NY, Onassis Foundation, Alpha Bank, MOMUS Greece, Benaki Museum, MIET foundation, Venizelos Airport Athens.

Opening hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 14:00-20:00&Saturday 12:00 – 16:00