“Where I Come From”: The childlike universe of Leonie Yagdzoglou

On February 12, at 7:00 pm, the solo exhibition of the multifaceted creator Leonie Yagdzoglou, titled “WHERE I COME FROM”, opens at Contemporary Athens Gallery (5 Neofytou Vamva Street, Kolonaki). The exhibition will run until March 7.

Contrary to what usually happens, the artistically multidimensional Leonie does not focus on a single theme or on one art form. Instead, she works across many and combines them inventively and originally. Ceramics, painting, and strong sculptural elements complement one another, highlighting the distinctive identity of Leonie’s artistic expression.

Unexpected everyday materials such as threads, fabrics, springs, and wires sometimes soft, sometimes more rigid are brought into dialogue with clay, giving it the chance to overcome static form. Always through an inexhaustible, childlike imagination, these works invite the viewer to touch them, listen to them, dream with them, and complete them with their own imagination. Surrealism, movement, and above all freedom are their most characteristic qualities.

One could say that these works are never finished. They continue to be completed, to change, to transform. After all, this is a core belief of Leoni’s that nothing is exactly as it appears at first glance, that nothing ever stops changing or evolving. Her creativity is always connected to the inexhaustible source of inspiration that is the absolute freedom of our childhood imagination. Everything we imagine exists, and everything is negated and reborn at the same moment through our human, childlike essence.

The exhibition includes four main bodies of work:

Leoni’s Library – “The Solid Book Collection”: A collection of ceramic-sculptural books, hand-painted. These books are alive and tell stories by projecting elements from their unreadable histories.

Totemic ceramic-sculptural micro-furniture titled “mobelitos,” presented for the first time:
They seem as if they have just landed from another planet. Joyful, uncanny, teasing, and at the same time lovable, they embody an archetypal image. Through the flow of clay form and color, one can almost imagine them speaking.

The emblematic totems, known from previous exhibitions: Works that represent Leoni’s enduring love for the field of ceramics.

Last but not least: The impressive ritual banners –remarkable not only for their scale but above all for their conception, themes, and colors -which are Leoni’s most recent works.

Lines that connect, symbols that intertwine, succeed one another and narrate stories from the collective unconscious–familiar yet forgotten.

In The Solid Book Collection, the visitor–viewer and reader at the same time–reads each book in a different way and is invited, if they wish, to write a paragraph of their own.

The ritual banners made of sailcloth are surfaces “embroidered” in painterly fashion with vivid colors, figures, and symbols that compose hundreds of small images. A universe that at first glance startles the viewer, but then immediately leads them into worlds and emotions from another reality to which they feel instantly connected.

“It is my inner impulse and my belief that the key to our creative identity lies in the earliest years of our lives,” says Leonie Yagdzoglou.

She adds: “At that age, we experience the world with pure curiosity and innocence, carrying within us the fresh memory of our origin where we come from.

That is also where the title of this year’s exhibition comes from: WHERE I COME FROM.

“My aim with each of my works is to pass through this lived experience and reach that primordial source where the untamed imagination of the soul is the only reality.”