“Threat Detected”: Solo exhibition by Antigone Kavvatha at Ekfrasi – Yianna Grammatopoulou Art Gallery Exhibitions

Ekfrasi – Yianna Grammatopoulou Art Gallery inaugurates on Thursday, November 27, the solo exhibition of Antigone Kavvatha titled “Threat Detected.”

“Since the mid-2010s, Antigone Kavvatha has turned toward history, collective memory and contemporary reality, toward the public sphere and global conditions, creating works that raise broader questions and touch upon social and political issues.
In 2017 she begins The Journey, an ambitious visual project still in progress – a contemporary frieze that thematically unfolds from the October Revolution and Latin America to the immigrants of Ellis Island and the political refugees of our time. The most recent part of this frieze is the composition Among the Dead Cities, where an image from the Warsaw Ghetto coexists with images of the ruins of the bombed cities of Hamburg, Montbourg, Cologne and Guernica during the period 1937–1945.
Alongside the ruins, a series of large-scale compositions depicting metal containers that enclose death are presented. And next to them, in an unexpected and ironic juxtaposition, a crumpled Coca-Cola can and a UNRRA food tin appear as symbols of American dominance.

Antigone Kavvatha achieves remarkable aesthetic results in this body of work through strict draughtsmanship and sensitivity. A warning sign – a yellow, prohibitive triangle – reads: “Threat Detected.” Her works are images of a violent and bleak reality that continually repeats itself, a memory that must remain alive, before and after us.” This is how art historian and exhibition curator Giannis Bolis describes her work.