PRESS RELEASE

THANASSIS TOTSIKAS

22/3 – 20/5/2000

Opening 22/3/2000, 8 pm

Thanassis Totsikas is born in 1951 in Larissa (Thessalia, greece); he lives and works in Larissa.

Selected Exhibitions:

1990 Artificial Nature, Deste Foundation, Athens

1991 Dokumenta IX, Kassel

1993 De la main a la tete, Domaine de Kerguehennec Art Center, France

1996 Greek realities, galerie Am Marshall, Berlin

1997 Totsikas – Ducati, Greek Pavillion, Venice Biennale

Collaboration with M.Levinas, Cite de la Musique, Paris

Thanassis Totsikas started his career in the eighties, with environments or large mural works often related to fundamental forms like the cylinder, the sphere and the cube.

Since this early works, energy is the recurrent element, characterized by strong lightings or incandescent objects (Incandescent Burning House, 1992) and more recently by projections or speed.

At this time he first introduced the notion of incident or event, which was expanded and evolved into the work as situation. This development reached its complete expression with his work Totsikas – Ducati for the greek pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 1997: a unitary work, an ensemble composed of a red Ducati 916, painted metal panels on which slides were projected and photographic enlargments of the motorcycle mounted by the artist himself. The high speed becomes the catalysor for Totsikas’s awareness of the momentum, through the superposition of a high-technology object and nature (landscape).

For his first solo exhibition since 1997, Totsikas will present a serie of paintings on aluminium. This serie marks a new phase in his work, always being at the marge of any categorization. The artist who lives in the country side of central Greece, built a closed and ventilated space, using the same operating process as for the industrial car paint to create flashy and glossy compositions, oscillating between geometrical colored patterns and natural details or domestic recurrent elements (also sometimes his own name), abstract grids and smooth spaces.

The rapid changes made in communication have transformed our relationship to what is thought as nature: we entered a world where our environment became predominantly abstract, both visually and physically. In this context, each oeuvre can be read as an interruption of the constant motion, the manufactured object becoming the background (the process refering to the aesthetic of the engine as well as his intrinsec properties) of the experience.

A catalogue will be published for the exhibition, with an introduction by Denys Zacharopoulos.

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