An exhibition by contemporary Greek painter Katerina Dramitinou entitled "Astrocytes" opened to the public on Saturday 29 June at the shop gallery in Glebe, Sydney Australia and will run till Wednesday 3 July.
Her work often explores themes of nature and human perception, much like her traditional paintings. “Astrocytes” is a digital art series that delves into the intricate connections between the human mind, natural elements and history.
Her work often reflects the patterns and rhythms found in nature. Her work has been exhibited widely in Greece, France, Austria, Germany, the United States, Italy, Mexico, Argentina and the Netherlands.
Opening Night introduction to the work by Professor Vrasidas Karalis:
As the Astrocytes reverse the gaze
Rilke wrote that beauty is “the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” Every time we look at Katerina Dramitinou’s artworks you have the uncanny sensation that they look back at you and try to abduct you to their own territory of the angelic and the terrible.
In all her works we are surrounded by boxes that imprison our mental ability to look beyond what is depicted in the picture. A place of confluence between Marc Chagal and Alselm Keifer through the redeeming passions of Frida Khalo, Dramitinou’s paintings depict flowers, the utmost manifestation of natural freedom and creative urge, closed into small cages and dark hues of chromatic melancholia.
Her Flowers and the medical works frame the great tragedy of the human mind as it reflects its own implosion and its painful adaptation to conventions and the expectations of its environment. The pain itself spiritualizes the vision and transforms it into a mystical vision of the human body in its attempt to retrieve its completeness.
Astrocytes are the building blocks of our nervous system. What happens when they malfunction or mutate? There is an apocryphal alchemy happening as we confront these images: the horrifying instruments that medicalize the body in order to save and destroy it simultaneously foreground a profound hyperesthesia as the body remembers its own completeness and purity. The mythical sites of her imaginary can be found in mental institutions, on the small island of Leros, a symbol to the dehumanization of personal existence that we witnessed several years ago.
What do these artworks want from us? We are the guilty bystanders watching the crashing defeat of the human mind at the same time that the human spirit declares its endurance and perseverance. I am defeated but I still exist, they declare. Syringes, doctors, medication, the abandoned clothes, the demonic rooms of isolation will never defeat human dignity and the grace that imparts upon everything that encounters; that is to say upon us. Dramitinou’s astrocytes offer to us the grace that is missing from our own existence, as they transform the tragic suffering of her mind into a profound call for creativity and spiritual resistance.
