Building on earlier exhibitions curated by Jeffrey Deitch and organized by DESTE, Everything That’s Interesting Is New continues to explore the interplay between contemporary art and contemporary pop culture. Hosted at “The Factory,” the newly renovated exhibition space of the Athens School of Fine Arts, the exhibition showcases for the first time the entire Dakis Joannou Collection.
The Collection places an emphasis on a younger group of artists who came to prominence in the 1990s and includes some of the most influential art works of the previous decade such as Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). It also features works by early and mid-twentieth century artists who have been especially influential for the current generation such as, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, and significant works by key figures in Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual Art, as well as Arte Povera.
Everything That’s Interesting Is New explores one of the major aesthetic themes of the 1980s, the conflation of the artificial and the real. As artists looked back into their personal histories as a way to penetrate the artificiality of contemporary life, they began resurrecting a deeper reality. Artists may not have been able to find the truth in the multilayered reality of everyday life, but by retreating into the realm of childhood memories, dreams, and religious experiences, they kept looking for it in themselves. Artificiality ultimately leads us back to authenticity. Truth is inside us.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from the Truisms by Jenny Holzer, one of the artists represented in the collection.
