Fragments of a Broken Season

About

The exhibition Fragments of a Broken Season - featuring works by Barbar, David Benforado, Angelos Christofilopoulos, Eberhard Frohlich, Nasser Hussein, Ali Kaaf, Michael Kirkham, Maria Polyzoidou, Manolis Tsafos,  Dimitris Tzamouranis and Daniel Wiesenfeld - deals with questions of aesthetics and diachronic values of humanism in art. Curated by David Benforado, the show brings together photo reporting of the current refugees influx into Europe, riots in Athens and works that reflect upon the more general nature of the human condition. The focus is on the poetics as well as the aesthetics of the image, and how they are manipulated by the artists. 

As the title suggests, with its play of words from John Cale’s famous album, all works presented in the show evoke the memories of something as timeless and recurrent as the seasons, they create stories that are small fragments of a universal narrative: the struggle of human life. Be it the reality of Greek – Macedonian borders, captured by the photographs of Angelos Christofilopoulos, with its tales of patrols and barbed wire, be it the ghostly figures of Athenian rioters – as seen through the lens of Manolis Tsafos – portraying the face of a country’s deep crisis, or the broken pieces of mirror that won’t reflect the sky – as in Ali Kaaf’s work. 

The painters presented in this exhibition each have a very distinct timbre in their way of handling and manipulating images, ranging from the highly figurative, masterful and detailed works of Barbar, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Maria Polyzoidou, to the imaginary scenes of domestic lives and urban living by Nasser Hussein and Daniel Wiesenfeld, and finally to the stillness of time in Michael Kirkham’s enigmatic still life painting; or in the case of artist Eberhart Fröhlich, the seemingly casual paintings transport us to ominous surroundings. The spectrum reaches the complete abstractness in the work of David Benforado, where colors and shapes are suggestive of dark and empty landscapes. 

In all cases however the result is common: the creation of narratives where the human factor – and its absence – is at the centre.