elc team
George Benias Gallery presents, starting December 16, It Felt Like a Movie, Alexandra Dorè’s new exhibition, featuring large-scale tapestry works that weave together personal memory, visual culture, and sacred weaving traditions reinterpreted through contemporary production methods.
For this exhibition, Dorè collaborated with specialised workshops responsible for producing tapestries for the Vatican and the Orthodox Church. The works are woven using advanced digital looms and incorporate a range of threads-cotton, silk, synthetic fibres, and metallic yarns-materials historically associated with ecclesiastical grandeur, here reimagined in the service of secular, image-driven narratives.
The imagery stems from Dorè’s collage practice, marked by sharp wit, sarcasm, and an unmistakable appropriation of advertising language. Her compositions often feel promotional and theatrical, deliberately amplifying desire, glamour, and spectacle. In It Felt Like a Movie, the artist returns to the A4 paper collages she created as a child, translating these early visual instincts into monumental works.
The scenes draw characters and figures from different historical periods, abolishing time and context. These disparate protagonists appear as if cast to co-exist in a single, continuous film-part fantasy, part memory, part cultural montage. After weaving, Dorè hand-embroiders each tapestry with glass beads, introducing shimmer, texture, and interruption. This final intervention restores the artist’s trace against the precision of the digital loom, merging mechanical production with intimate, manual labour.
It Felt Like a Movie explores the ways in which personal history, collective iconography, and cinematic imagination intertwine-how memory functions less as an archive and more as a staged spectacle. Alexandra Dorè lives and works in Athens.
