Eerie Walk
Lappas
Revolving around an uncompleted/work in progress, this fourth solo exhibition of the artist at CITRONNE Gallery, aims at shedding light on the George Lappas’s distinct thought and working process part of which was often dismantling a work and recomposing its parts into new sculptures. It therefore reveals the organic development of his work with its internal logic and its constantly subversive quality.
The selected works share the fragmented figure as well as balance and movement, static or not while many of them incorporate a source of light. The implication of «shadow» in the sense of an immaterial, invisible and non-present quality override mass and volume. Volume and mass override mass and volume. At the same time however, the works provoke a bodily experience, activate space and a reciprocal gaze wherein both viewer and the work become the subject and the object of vision.
A pioneering artist, George Lappas (1950-2016), who was also professor at Athens School of Fine Arts is also remembered for his ground-breaking, inspired teaching method, left behind a hugely rich work that has been appraised as a seminal case in contemporary sculpture. The cosmopolitan, intercultural perspective of this widely-travelled artist of the Greek diaspora who was born and spent his childhood in Egypt, his ties with the history of art and with memory, his delving into human psychology, are blended in an idiosyncratic work that never ceases to astound the viewer. His work was presented internationally in important exhibtions such as Metropolis at Martin Gropius Bau in 1991 as well as in some of the world’s largest Biennials such as the Venice Biennale in 1990 (his work was shown at the Greek national pavilion), the Alexandria Biennale where he was winner of the first prize and the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1987. That same year the artist created the installation Mappemonde, the Map of the World, a memory field reconstituted by CITRONNE Gallery in the artist’s exhibition in 2018.
