Lila Polenaki in her new solo exhibition hosted by the Batagianni gallery presents paintings of various dimensions from various moments of her creative career. A group of objects from her recent involvement with ceramics will converse "tenderly" with the painting crates.

About tender things (Von zarten Dingen): This is the title of a small collage by the German visual artist Hanna Hoch. An old friend of hers from Berlin sent it to Lila Polenaki. "I saw it and remembered you," he wrote to her. Thus, through the successive associations of memory, the title was attached to the present exhibition in the same way that the creator uses and incorporates in her painting, with sophisticated collage techniques, different materials.

These are mainly fabric and paper items: Old lace, embroidery and other handicrafts, pre-loved clothes, household textiles, transparencies with sewing patterns, pages with notes and sketches, handwritten letters, forms and much more. These materials, marked by time and charged by their previous uses, reach her hands by chance or are collected with care by herself, and in a way constitute her visual vocabulary. In the painting process, Lila Polenaki decomposes them, reassembles them, overlays them, imitates them, transforms them with her own personal idiom into images that can be read as imaginary spaces of memory.

Processed and integrated into the painted surface, the mass of matter alludes to a recreated female existence. Her images resemble ambiguous mental landscapes where sensations of physicality, memory, decay and loss poetically emerge. She herself experiences the painting process, among other things, in its redemptive dimension as an exercise of separation, as a ritual deposition of matter within the living place of art.

Opening: Tuesday 21 November 2023, 18.00 - 22.00

Lila Polenaki was born in Athens, studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Berlin, where she lived and worked for 18 years. He has held many solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. He lives and works in Athens.

When:

November 21, 2023 - December 23, 2023

TUESDAY 16:00 - 20:00
WEDNESDAY 16:00 - 20:00
THURSDAY 16:00 - 20:00
FRIDAY 16:00 - 20:00
SATURDAY 11:00 - 15:00

Free entrance.