A Potential Retrospective

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Retrospective exhibitions of living artists are a great and important occasion, both for the creators themselves and for the wider public, the so-called art-loving audience.

In this case, Lia Stamopoulou, a restless and multi-talented painter with a vast and multifaceted body of work—both in volume and in quality—ventures to confront her artistic journey. This is, as you might suspect, a painful comparison. At the same time, a larger audience will have the opportunity to assess, justly and appropriately, a body of work that in its entirety remains unknown and, in part, underestimated.

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Lia had the fortune of studying under great and respected names of the post-war art scene, thereby securing from a very early stage an educational authority and learning validity rarely encountered today. The Athens School of Fine Arts was, and still is in its own way, an agent of our cultural era. As you will see, Stamopoulou’s life and artistic path can serve as solid proof of this claim.

 

The painter, who has only been able to display a very small and purely indicative sample of her work in the showcases of the Parodios Arcade, has artistically moved within the style of abstract expressionism. This is a visual pursuit which, after the end of World War II, was able to function in a more cathartic and liberating way. Let us not forget that a similar crisis of representation—of the purpose that painting potentially sets—had already swept across Western Europe after 1918.

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All this led to a reduction of pictorial information, which, moving critically and questioningly against previous forms of painting, rejects academicism in terms of what and how things are depicted. At the same time, it attacks the rules of composition, bringing about a bold minimization of supplementary techniques. As a result, the expressiveness of an expressionistically rendered figure depends on the mastery of the painter’s hand movement, so that a curve, or a gradation in the density of a line or color, becomes the only and ultimately the last possible means of externalizing any emotions.

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This artistic school, stripped of multiple expressive means and idioms, understandably shaped corresponding psychodynamic parameters that could be described as rapid, austere, direct, instantaneous, abrupt, concise, and changeable. Many of these adjectives could easily accompany certain paintings, both of Stamopoulou and of other expressionist painters.

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This contextualization is necessary because, in the approximately 40 paintings presented in the exhibition, we see an artistic creation that begins in the mid-1970s and reaches the present day. Thus, we can all trace this artistic journey, which I dare to classify as the most sensitive and highly expressive example of the modern Greek abstract expressionist school.

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Konstantinos Basios
Member of A.I.C.A.

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