Zoumboulakis Galleries presents the new solo exhibition of Jannis Psychopedis entitled “Palermo. People and Ruins”, from 16 January to 8 February 2025. It is an installation on site made of painted bricks and tiles, surrounded by a series of one hundred mixed media drawings.

As the artist himself writes: “On the occasion of a recent trip to Magna Grazia and the ruins of its Sicilian civilizations, walking later on the hospitable Greek shores of the Peloponnese, far from the paranoia of the constraints of the big city, we also discovered the small treasures that the sea generously offers. Where it brings to the shores wonderful stones, pebbles, broken wood, shells, worn plastic, rusty iron, eaten marble. But most of all it drags the lightest of all, the things that are most easily pushed out by the waves and fill the beaches. It’s the broken bricks and tiles, the small corrupted forms, tile fragments that have lost their first shapes, years in the water. Scattered in the sand, with their strange facets, these “hives” of broken bricks and crushed pieces, with time having melted away their form, seek an imaginary, elliptical microcosm of a paradoxical micro-sculpture of volumes, plastic rhythms and curves of warm colour tones. Parts of old structures were once parts of old buildings, pieces and fragments of proud buildings, human constructions for humble or magnificent habitats, witnesses of other times, traces of the times that pass and leave behind ruins. From a distant or recent past washed up in the present, these broken pieces recall to our imagination their imaginary prehistory, an alien life that once existed, human beings building and consolidating their homes, their hopes and dreams.

These shattered memories, the fragments of another life, are today asking to be transformed through visual language into small symbolic “valleys of temples”, imaginary buildings and dwellings, primitive new settlements, testimonies of a new hope for the continuation of life.

New, bizarre, brick constructions that compose colourful feasts of “hives of life”, colourful entities of revived small, rebuilt ruins, in spite of the brutal times, in spite of the monochrome, black, dark portents.”

A Short Bio:

He was born in Athens in 1945.

He studied printmaking with a scholarship at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1963-1968). He completed postgraduate studies in painting (1970-1976) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He then settled in Germany as a guest of the Artistic Program of the City of West Berlin. In 1994 he was elected regular professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts. During the 1960s he was a member of the Artistic Group A in Athens and of the art group of the magazine “Art Review”. He was also a founding member of the group of the “New Greek Realists” (1971-1973) and of the Centre for Visual Arts (1974-1976). Since 1966 he has presented his work in solo and group exhibitions in major European cities, the USA and Japan.

Echibition Duration: 16 January– 8 February 2025

Zoumboulakis Galleries, Kolonaki Square,  20

Opening Hours: Tue., Thu. & Fri. 11.00 -20.00

Wed. & Sat. 11.00 –15.00

Sundays & Mondays closed