a.antonopoulou.art is pleased to announce Christina Mitrentse's second solo exhibition at the gallery, curated by Christoforos Marinos.

 

The artist, educator and curator, who has lived and worked in London for 20 years, presents for the first time in Athens a selection from her ongoing series of drawings, as well as sculptures (“Acrokerama”) as part of the larger “Add to My Library” project initiated in 2011. It is an international project on the relationship between art and books, which has been part of a series of exhibitions held in galleries and educational centers, in the United Kingdom, Europe and beyond.

 

Mitrentse’s exhibition, entitled MINUMENTAL, coincides with the topic of this year’s ICOM conference (“The Power of Museums”) that will take place in Prague in August. This ongoing series of large-scale and smaller drawings on paper present art museums from around the world (the new Tate Modern, EMST, the Acropolis Museum, WIELS, MACBA) along with monuments from the past, such as Stonehenge. They become bibliographic sculptures, in which the chunkiness of the codex is used as a building block, volumes literally volumising space, while a script of titles and authorial names is deployed across surfaces as if urban graffiti, or late-night neon inscription.

 

For Mitrentse, the activity of drawing is far more than a means of deceptive representation. It serves her heterotopic practice as a tool for critical enquiry, for mapping space and ultimately the construction of distinct worlds. In this complex universe, shaped by vintage artist’s books, screen printing, sculpture, performance and installation, drawing functions as a supermetaphor twisting its way through her work, constantly opens up visual possibilities.
Mitrentse’s work confirms Joseph Beuys' proposition that drawing is "a special kind of thought". That is, a highly charged species of conceptual drawing that avoids visceral gesture, being primarily intended to make the viewer ponder their ‘text’ of civilization in crisis.

Mitrentse has also stressed an interest in how “time can be captured/or represented by just the use of grey scale that comes from pencil and graphite” and reconstructing time through “the imagery of blocks- i.e. heritage, monuments” etc. What Mitrentse calls “shifting touch” is facilitated through smashing color pastel into powder, smudginess itself becoming a symbolic overlay of the new, or in this context bibliographic input from international contributors. Each drawing might function as domestic ‘shelving’, the traces of an attempted re-drawing of the cultural institution: the rigid construction of EMST becomes a ziggurat of ISBN.

 

Christina Mitrentse has exhibited extensively, shown her works in 20 solo exhibitions and over 200 group shows in galleries, museums and public spaces including, the Tate Modern, The Royal Academy, ICA London, PIAF Art Fair, Brussels Art Fair, London Art Fair, Art Fair Rotterdam, Liverpool Biennial UK, XV Biennale de Mediterranea, 2nd Bodrum International Biennial Turkey, NDSM- Werf Amsterdam, MOMUS State Museum of Modern Art, Jewish Museum of Greece, Hackney Museum, Nadine Feront Gallery, Dalla Rosa Gallery, The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Central Booking NY, The Centre for the Book Arts NY, San Francisco Centre for the Book, California, Drop -Hiroshima, Japan, Rise Berlin, Helsinki Contemporary Gallery.

Her work has been profiled in major publications such as The Word Is Art, Thames & Hudson, and “Unselfmarked” re-defined the Artists Book. Mitrentse’s artworks can be found in major private & public collections such as WWW foundation, MOCA London, Senate House, Book Arts UWE, LCC, (UAL), Women’s Art Library Goldsmiths University, The Feminist Library London, Book Art Centre NY, the National Library in Baghdad, Jewish Museum of Greece, Fine Art Society London, Greenwich Council, Sill Library Bath, Mol’s collection Holland, Tate Archive, Penguin Collectors Society, Griechische Kultustiftung Berlin, M. Altenman NY, Onassis Foundation, Alpha Bank, MOMUS Greece, Benaki Museum, MIET foundation, Venizelos Airport Athens.