Three years after his last solo exhibition Antonis Staveris presents at 16 Fokionos Negri his new series of works in his solo exhibition “The Odd Flora of Memory”. The exhibition is curated by Elissavet Sakareli and the opening night is on Wednesday 1st March at 8 p.m.

Following his nightscapes in Berlin and in Paris the painter returns with a new focus, this time on cityscapes of Athens.

Eight large oil canvases and five watercolours on paper comprise his new work.

Lina Tsikouta, Art Historian and Curator at the National Gallery in Athens, notes in her essay in the exhibition catalogue: “Realism and emotion through observation and experience. Furthermore, we notice a chromatic ability, in a quite expressionistic scale in the skies, the trees, nature, quite disturbing at times. Finally, travelling through Staveris’s paintings, we feel the poetry of the furtive, anonymous, lonely living of the residents of a large city like Athens. Landscapes, trees, skies, people, all coexist with the same value, without any particular sequence. The composition, usually intensely colourful, renders the random, the furtive, the fragmentary.  Paradox: the realistic and the more abstract coexist and alternate at the same time”.

Writer Michel Fais remarks: Staveris, indoor or outdoor, night or day, levitating between the introverted chromatic eudemonism of August Macke and the ice-cold dream realism of David Ηοckney, is essentially reflected in the memory of the memory, in the desire of the desire, and it is precisely this multiplied reflection, the hidden reduction, which activates, stimulates, defines after all his gaze, both in the world and on the canvas.

Nikos Milionis, in his text, writes that “Staveris displays the morose ambiance of the Athenian landscape, highlighting our society’s emotional state by exhibiting the urban scenery over the human element, since it is in this scenery that the inner melancholia of humans is more intensely reflected.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated bilingual (Greek-English) catalogue, which includes texts by Lina Tsikouta-Deimezi, Michel Fais and Nikos Milionis.