Lands of Creation, 2019

Group exhibition in Averoff Art Gallery, Metsovo Greece curated by Lina Tsikouta

Origin, 2019 was commissioned by curator Lina Tsikouta for the Averoff Art Gallery in Metsovo, the mountain village of my grandfather, where I spent summers and holidays as a child. Metsovo lies in the heart of Epirus, where nature rules with a wild, untamed force. The painting became a return — to place, to memory, to the roots beneath the surface. I worked with recollections of hiding and playing inside the hollows of trees, with the image of roots twisting like veins, and with the sepia faces of my great-grandfathers that line the walls of our family home. It is a work where memory liquefies into color, where ancestry and landscape intermingle, where impressions merge through paint.

Lina Tsikouta, extracts from the exhibition catalog

‘Katerina Papazissi focuses on the body and nature. For the work she produced especially for the exhibition, it all started with the discovery of a photo of her extended family, which prompted her to bring together Metsovo’s nature and figures of the artist’s family members. The region’s landscape and nature, and the experiences and memories of the artist’s childhood all merge into a complex composition. Papazissi originally comes from Metsovo, and she uses her background to draw on lived memories. She considers her childhood memories to have played a large part in shaping her identity …Indistinct eyes, numberless hands, figures hidden in the foliage, tree trunks, flowers and fruits merge in a unique, expressionistic, surrealistic, abstract work of psychoanalytic associations based on memory and ancestry. ‘