Marina Karella: “Le Passage – Si la vie n’est qu’un passage, sur ce passage au moins semons des fleurs.”

Marina Karella presents her new body of work in the solo exhibition Le Passage at Zoumboulakis Galleries.

This new body of work creates a space of transition, a true “passage” into a new artistic idiom. It is not merely a thematic reference, but a substantial shift in her visual language. Works on canvas, alongside drawings, ceramic vases, plates, and painted tiles, underline Karella’s desire to cross the boundaries between painting and object, the everyday and the imaginary, the elevated and the familiar.

With a long-standing career in painting and sculpture, marked by bodies of work centered on folds, interiors, and dreamlike environments, her practice now appears more liberated than ever before. Drawing frees itself from description, while color takes on a leading role. Her subjects-without losing their dreamlike quality-acquire new characteristics.

Animal and human figures, vegetal forms, and landscapes come together to compose Karella’s universe of “magical realism,” which seems to gain new vitality here. The metaphysical dimension of the figures no longer merely suggests their presence, but brings them clearly into the viewer’s gaze. The viewer is invited to move through an environment where narration is not linear, but fragmentary and poetic.

Karella proposes a parallel world, luminous and playful, which nevertheless loses none of its realistic and existential dimension.

“If life is nothing but a passage, then in this passage at least let us sow flowers.”

A phrase attributed to Michel de Montaigne, writer, born on February 18, 1533.

Marina Karella will also participate in the group exhibition Life Cycles, organized in collaboration with Amanzoe, in Kranidi, Argolis, alongside four other Greek female visual artists, presenting sculptural works. The exhibition will run from May 22 to October 30, 2026.

Short Biography

Marina Karella (b. 1940) is a painter and sculptor who has lived and worked between Athens, Paris, and New York throughout her life. She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg. She began her career designing stage sets and costumes for the theatre, before dedicating many decades to painting, alongside radical material experiments that led to her emblematic drapery sculptures. The influence of her mentor, the renowned painter Yannis Tsarouchis, can be traced in many of her translucent, dreamlike paintings, as can the imprint of the years she spent creating sculpture in her Manhattan studio during the city’s artistic peak.

During the 1970s and 1980s, she worked under the patronage of the influential New York gallerist Alexander Iolas, before going on to exhibit internationally. Moving between portraiture, still life, and landscape, her postmodern works range from narrative representation to archetypal symbolism. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker and is included in numerous important private collections and museums, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Menil Collection in Houston, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, the National Gallery of Greece, and the Yokohama Center in Japan. In 2005, Benaki Museum presented a major retrospective solo exhibition of her work in Athens. She is also the founder and president of the non-profit organization ELIZA, dedicated to the prevention of child abuse.