Alexandra Athanassiades

Fragments

May 25, 2024 - September 30, 2024

Archaeological Museum of Poros

Archaeological Museum of Poros
Korizi Square
18020 Poros Island
Greece

(+30) 697 9989 684

Opening Hours
Mon, Wed-Sun:
08.30-16.00

Alexandra Athanassiades was born in 1961 in Athens, Greece where she still lives and works. Her higher education began in Switzerland, at Lugano’s Franklin College. In 1982 she graduated with distinction from Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at St. Anne’s College and was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Printmaking. In 1984 she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from New York’s Columbia University. Since 1984 she has shown her work in several solo and group exhibitions in Athens, Delphi, Ancient Messene, Poros, Larissa, Thessaloniki, Heraklion, Patmos, Ioannina, Paris, New York Connecticut, Brussels, London and Monte Carlo where in 1995 she won the Princess Grace Foundation Award.

Alexandra Athanassiades’ works are inspired by and made of fragments. Fragments constitute an inherent starting point whether they are miscellaneous elements found in nature or intangible bits of memories. Quite often, the materials she employs, namely wood and iron, are random finds; the poetic and historical memory emerges –in a selective and fragmentary fashion– from the horses and the study of the frieze. Time and the resulting wear of the primary elements, both material and immaterial, leave distinct and familiar marks that narrate a personal story or what is left of it.
As in all Museums, the exhibits in the Archaeological Museum of Poros comprise fragments and bits from monuments and sculptures which produce an image of the distant past; it is an ancient reality, perhaps not a living one, but most certainly existent and emotively functional. The whole emerges from the parts. Τhe connective tissue with the present is woven by the monumental remnants of the distant being.
We identify the same direction in the works of Alexandra Athanassiades, but in reverse. The present recovers or even dictates the past through selected material or immaterial finds which acquire substance, life and function. They engage in a dialogue with the museum exhibits as the figments of a “fragmented” memory.