katerina papazissi
I'm an artist based in Athens, Greece. I reclaim the imaginary of the body and its desire through the materiality of painting and its expanded forms.
Message
Katerina Papazissi is an artist based in Athens, Greece. Her studio practice is rooted in painting and expands to sculptural gestures and installative formations. It explores the image as a site of transformation, interconnectedness and the reclaiming of narratives.
Recent solo exhibitions include A Dancefloor of One’s Own at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Arts Center (2024) and But Today It Is Different at Athens Municipality Cultural Center (2022), curated by Christoforos Marinos. Notable group exhibitions include A Rave Down Below as part of 2023 Eleusis-European Capital of Culture, curated by Panos Giannikopoulos, and Lavreotiki Land at Lavrion Technological Park (2023).
In 2006, Papazissi co-curated Plastira 16 (Disposable Gallery), a collective project housed in her soon-to-be-demolished home, which represented Greece at the Biennale of Young Artists in Puglia (2008). She was a resident at Monson Arts, Maine, in November 2023 and participated with a scholarship in Oxbow School of Art's Conversations in Practice (2022).
Papazissi holds an Integrated BA-MA in Painting from the Athens School of Fine Arts, and an MA in Design Studies from Central Saint Martin’s College, London. Her early studies in Social Psychology (BSc) and Media and Communications (MSc), London School of Economics, and her long involvement with contemporary dance and other somatic practices significantly inform her artistic practice.
Statement
My studio practice is rooted in painting and expands to sculptural gestures and installative formations. It addresses themes of corporeality, interconnectedness, and transformation. Central to my work is a longstanding calling to reclaim the space of the body and its desire, intertwining painterly, psycho-social, and philosophical concerns.
My deep engagement with somatic practices and contemporary dance drives me to recreate the textures and gestures of the moving body into material form. Oil paint, color, clay transmit the experience of the body as flesh, as fluid materiality in a neverending transmutation, that creates pictorial space through its movement.
I draw on feminist influences and the landscape, natural, urban, and cultural. In my drawings, collages, and monotypes, I process images from art history, popular culture, and political events. In my paintings, these come into play with my body and my materials. I overlay gestures and references, employing strategies of interruption and restructuring, fragmentation and amalgamation, disrupting systems of representation. Alternative narratives are created in the event of the painting, as images overcome their boundaries, mirroring the constant transformation of our identity and everything surrounding us. I challenge historical representations of female passivity, bringing a collective body of painting in dialogue with the body and the present moment. Excessive, swirling, colorful, and grotesque forms interplay in a tension between figuration and abstraction.
In providing a space for self-definition and mediation between the inner and outer world, my practice has operated as a life tool and vessel to move beyond limiting conditions of being. As it keeps evolving, I define my own aesthetics, questioning the boundaries and binary distinctions that define the human experience of reality.