Artist Profiles
Nikos Alexiou
Nikos Alexiou, is a Greek artists and collector most known for his installation The End exhibited at Venice Biennale, Greek Pavilion in 2007. His most obvious signature is the use of fragile, lightweight materials (bamboo shoots in his early work and now semi-transparent paper ) which he combines to form geometric patterns. For the Celestial Contrakt he has created an installation that pulls together the various strands that have run through his work for more than two decades. Each part of this installation is a link in a chain. Images are deconstructed and then reassembled, suggesting that art is a self-sustaining, orderly, closed circuit. Suspended grid-like structures, made from coloured cotton threads, creating a heraldic yet ethereal effect that is enhanced by the light streaking through the patterns. His use of such ephemera accentuates a feeling of playful vulnerability and lends his surfaces a warm, evanescent quality. Alexiou often returns to early ideas taken from his visits to the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, some with Byzantine references. He employs a cut-and-paste technique to transform the original images of the floor plan into abstract, interrelated motifs. Alexiou traces these images which he then pieced together to form a curtain before presenting them as the set design for a theatre adaptation of a folk tale.
