Around About, 2025

AROUND ABOUT investigates the tension between appearance and reality, exploring how materials can deceive and shape perception. The body functions as the primary medium in these transformations, determining how we experience our surroundings. This experience is mediated through our senses, while our mind interprets the world.

[…….]each of the five featured artistic positions interprets material transformation and the interplay between fragility and toughness in their own way, revealing how perception, matter, and consciousness are inseparably intertwined. Diverse mediums are reshaped and placed in new contexts, redefining their original properties. Seemingly hard metal plates are made of paper, carefully painted and formed into intricate structures. Other works evoke floral forms yet are made from solid steel, bent with immense force into fragile, almost plant-like shapes. Human-made paintings range from naturalistic and digitally generated to hyperreal, while sculptures appear as though salvaged from shipwrecks but are in fact composed of delicate ceramics, shaped through subtle interventions. Deception becomes a conceptual tool, only revealed at second glance, making transformation tactile as a state suspended between destruction and creation. What we see at first glance is rarely the full story. Foundations of our life and self are often not immediately apparent. It requires time, patience and an active engagement of perception to see beyond appearances.

[….]Katerina Papazissi, living and working in Greece, explores the tension between the body, nature, and the unconscious. In her large-scale triptych, movements unfold between sky and earth, abstract bodies suspended between matter and dissolurion. The dry pastel powder she uses suggests both the sensation of touch and the transience of flesh as it transforms into dust. In Transmutation, Papazissi works with lightweight concrete and plaster, materials of architecture, shaping them into organic forms. She captures the moment when the made becomes aive, dissolving the separation between human and nature. It is a corrosion from within, a return of the repressed, and a poetic breach of the boundary between the artificial and the living.

Julia Harrauer, 2025