Simone Leigh: Anatomy of Architecture

From 28 April to 31 October 2025, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) presents, for the first time in Greece, an exhibition of works by the internationally acclaimed African American sculptor Simone Leigh.

Over the last twenty years Simone Leigh has created a multi-faceted body of work incorporating sculpture, video, and installation, all informed by her ongoing exploration of Black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh describes her work as auto-ethnographic, and her sculptures often employ forms traditionally associated with African art. She is the first African American woman to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion for best entry in the main exhibition “Milk of Dreams” for her monumental sculpture Brick House.

Three bronze sculptures, Vessel, Bisi and Herm, will be installed in the Agora of the SNFCC in an exhibition made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). These works were first shown in 2023 at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. These are sculptures that are striking in their abstract form, typical examples of the work of the artist, whose work often associates the female body with domestic containers or architectural elements, focusing on unrecognized stories of care, labor, or even consumption.

The exhibition of these works in the SNFCC Agora aims to bring visitors into contact (or confrontation) with the three imposing sculptural forms, offering them a powerful visual experience that reinforces the role of the SNFCC as a constantly evolving platform for Art in Public Space and the principles it is able to dynamically promote: either through an unmediated interaction or through a curated experience, contemporary art is introduced through a multifaceted program that presents the exhibition to the less initiated audience, but also re-introduces the more familiar audience within a new context of integration of the works.

Simone Leigh | Bio

Simone Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967. Since the early 2000s, she has had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among others. Her work was included in the 2012 and 2019 Whitney Biennials in New York. She is the first artist commissioned for the High Line Plinth; her monumental sculpture Brick House was unveiled in April 2019.

In 2022, Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale. She also won the Golden Lion for her work in the central exhibition. In 2023, her 20-year career survey exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

Photograph: Vessel, Bisi, Herm, from right to left
Photo credits: Timothy Schenck