Fifteen years after the fall of the Greek military junta, Topos-Tomes tries to offer a glimpse at contemporary Greek art which only recently has stopped being one of exile. Showing the latest works of artists who either became established or first appeared in the art world during the 1980’s, the exhibition presents eleven different idioms and personal critiques that fall under a common concept – the metapolitefsi;, the transitional period in Greek history after the fall of the dictatorship to the legislative elections of 1974 and the democratic period that followed immediately after.
Although the artists share similar backgrounds and work in the same sociopolitical context, there is much that separates them in the visual arts. Presenting original works which characterize the attitudes, experiences, and interpretations that today’s Greek visual artists must face in confrontation with tradition, Topos-Tomes invites each artist to express their own perspective on social ideals and values in a different, singular manner.
With the definition of topos as a theoretical place of different meanings and aesthetic expressions and of tomes as points that intersect reality, the works on display represent eleven separate paths which meet at a crossroad. They are different trajectories that share a coherent moral stance towards art; a fact, which in their work, functions and appears as a common aesthetic value.
