Friday 7 July - Saturday 15 July 2017

transposing cultural memory into the visual present

In Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley refers figuratively to the symbols, myths, and narratives that frame our conscious understanding as ‘landscapes’. For him our mythical underpinnings, our grip on the world, are cognitive locations wherein we rather comfortably dwell. By extension, the role of art is to press our impulse to expand beyond this realmand explore. Through this geospatial and acutely visual metaphor, Huxley effectively suggests that art in its full potential can provoke a journey to the farthest reaches of our mental latitudes – the antipodes of the mind – that provide new vistas, new worlds, and new places to inhabit.  Like the Great Explorers of bygone ages, the visual dimension provokes us to discover places where, as Huxley describes them, the bewildering phantasms of both gods and monsters may be encountered.

Abstracted Mythologies 3: Athens is the third in a series of exhibitions appearing in London, Copenhagen, Athens and New York that endeavours to bring this idea to life by extending the familiar into the unfamiliar and to bring into contact visual interpretations from various transnational perspectives of what one could loosely define as ‘foundational cultural narratives’. This could mean anything from ancient myths and stories that help to shape a specific cultural identity to more proximate political narratives that likewise help to structure the political character of a society such as ‘the myth of democratic progress’. 

With an eye to looking at different ways in which such symbolic frameworks can be given life in visual form, Abstracted Mythologies brings together artists from Greece, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States demonstrating a variety of artistic approaches that aspire to stoke that impulse for exploration. The intention is to examine how these differing and often highly embedded evocations of cultural narrative compete with or complement each other in the context of visual dialogue, perhaps taking the seemingly familiar into the realm of the unknown, not by a radical breaking but by a considered process of aesthetic extension. 

Curated by Michael Delacruz

Artists:

DAVID BIRKIN (UK)

MICHAEL DELACRUZ (US)

MARIA GLYKA (GR)

STEFFEN LEVRING (DK)

JANNE MALMROS (DK)

SARAH MCNULTY (US)

ROBERT PHILLIPS (UK)

PIPPA RIDLEY (UK)

VASSILIS VLASTARAS (GR)

07.07 – 15.07  2017

Preview – Friday 07.07, 20:00

BETON 7

7, Πύδνας / Pydnas St.

Αθήνα / Athens

Βοτανικός / Votanikos 11855