“The End. A Study in Infinity”: Revisiting Nikos Alexiou

Zoumboulakis Gallery presents Nikos Alexiou’s The End. A Study in Infinity, marking 15 years since the artist’s passing.

Zoumboulakis Gallery presents the exhibition of Nikos Alexiou, The End. A Study in Infinity, curated by Christoforos Marinos. Marking fifteen years since the artist’s passing, the gallery revisits a section of the emblematic work The End, which represented Greece at the Venice Biennale, highlighting its enduring relevance despite the temporal distance that separates us from that moment. The central installation and projection are accompanied by a selected group of Alexiou’s works.

Art historian and curator Christoforos Marinos notes:

“The re-presentation of The End, nearly twenty years later and in a new iteration, cannot be separated from the absence of Nikos Alexiou himself, who passed away prematurely in February 2011. Today, his work, a body of work that poetically and enigmatically illustrated the notion of the end, is called upon to exist without the presence of the one who continually activated it through gesture and thought. Yet this absence does not transform The End into a monumental relic; rather, it renders even more visible its fundamental quality as a handcrafted practice unfolding within time. Nothing closes definitively; whatever reappears lives only through its recontextualization.

For Alexiou, the experience of a work of art rests upon an ‘oblique’ relationship, a path in which the gaze does not dominate but wanders and returns. As early as his 2007 interview, he spoke of the end as a moment of concentration: as one approaches the end, what has preceded becomes clearer, for the end reveals the path, not the other way around. Today, this thought acquires new weight. The End, without its creator present, is now organized around memory, absence, and void, shifting emphasis from gesture to trace.

The new version of The End at Zoumboulakis Gallery constitutes a reframing rather than a retrospective gesture. The work’s reappearance forcefully reintroduces the question of the relationship between the end and infinity. What is presented was conceived from the outset to transform, to adapt to new spaces, and to function within different temporal contexts without losing its core. In an era when the end is often experienced as rupture or exhaustion, Alexiou’s work proposes a different understanding: the end as a ritual point of contact with living form with what Henri Focillon described as ‘the life of forms.’

To encounter it again today, in an age of acceleration and continuous image consumption, means to approach it as a proposal for another temporality. It is a work open, in a state of constant remaining forever here, as an artistic vision that survives, transforms, and returns.”

The exhibition is supported by AMKE O Megalos Kipos – Archives of Nikos Alexiou.

The Athens presentation serves as an introduction to the forthcoming retrospective of Nikos Alexiou, which will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete in May 2026.

A few words about Nikos Alexiou (1960–2011)

Nikos Alexiou, one of the most significant Greek artists of his generation, was born in Rethymno, Crete, in 1960. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna (1982–1983) before continuing at the Athens School of Fine Arts, in the printmaking studio of K. Grammatopoulos.

His first solo exhibition (Desmos Gallery, 1985), featuring compositions made from natural materials such as stone, wood, and clay, emerged from his early investigations into primordial human constructions. As his practice evolved, his focus shifted toward natural phenomena, particularly movement and the reflections of light, the analysis of light rays, and the projection of iridescent effects onto various surfaces or water.

Alexiou developed intricate lace-like geometric installations constructed from reed or paper in varying scales, creating fluid and poetic environments often charged with symbolic resonance. His work consistently intertwined references to tradition and historical memory with a striking diversity of media, ranging from fragile handcrafted structures to advanced technological processes.

From 2003 onward, he engaged deeply with themes and motifs drawn from the Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, which he visited frequently. Through complex visual means and a contemplative sensibility, he articulated the mystical dimension and architectural richness of religious space.

He represented Greece at the 23rd Alexandria Biennale (2005) and at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) with his widely discussed work The End, a large-scale installation inspired by the mosaic floor of the Katholikon of the Iviron Monastery. A concise version of the work, featuring digitally processed renderings of the same mosaic, was presented concurrently in Athens (Zoumboulakis Gallery, 2007) and Munich (Françoise Heitsch / Gallery for Contemporary Art, 2007). In a related development, large-scale digital prints depicting St Mark’s Square and Basilica in Venice were presented at Zoumboulakis Gallery in 2010, forming a second phase of the same artistic trajectory.

Alongside his visual art practice, Alexiou designed sets for numerous theatrical productions, primarily in Greece. He collaborated with Dimitris Papaioannou’s “Omada Edafous” (Ground Team) and with several major theatre companies. He was also a collector of contemporary art.

Until his untimely death in Athens in 2011, Alexiou had presented his work in more than fifteen solo exhibitions and in numerous group exhibitions in Greece and internationally.