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). She will be a resident at Golden Artist Colors in March 2026.
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 practice is rooted in painting, informed by my background in social psychology, media, and somatic practices. It explores embodiment and representation in the fluid space between figuration and abstraction. The image becomes a site of transformation where new figurations and narratives emerge, reclaiming feminine desire and corporeality.
I work primarily with oil on canvas as well as monotype and mixed media on paper, and occasionally with sculptural forms. My works often start as a dialogue with other images, from art history, contemporary media, and my personal photographic archive. Forms surface through process, shaped by the encounter between my body and the medium itself, entangled in a shared unconscious. This exchange is erotic, grounded in color and affect, resonating with feminist psychoanalytic thought.
My work exists in a state of continual becoming. Swirling, visceral forms dissolve and reassemble, inviting repeated looking and resisting closure. I am interested in moving beyond dualistic logic, toward coexistence between seemingly opposing conditions.
My practice is both personal and political. I paint to immerse myself in color and matter, affirming my love for the physical act of painting and its material history. At the same time, I work to challenge the history of representation, reimagining the images that have defined us and shaped our ways of seeing the world. I aim to bring painting's tradition into urgent dialogue with the present, making it a vehicle for contemporary concerns, and celebrating the female body as a site of agency, relation, and resistance.