"Wave" is a mural that says goodbye to yesterday, yet hoping for tomorrow. In the gloomy days we've lived in, Sofia Stevi's mural sends a coded message of optimism.
The mural occupies the side view of a 5-story apartment building located at 18 Dorylaou Street, near Mavili Square. At the top of a long, unclean wall, which bears the traces of a demolished dwelling, passers-by ascending Lycabettus Hill raise their heads to behold, against the background of the Attic sky, a dreamlike composition of undulating figures 13 meters high. A sensuous female figure, a naked Venus with the head of a serpent, accompanies a black mass that resembles a menacing cloud or raging wave. With a strongly symbolic and allegorical character, Stevi's mural conveys the mixed emotions we feel in times of crisis. Like most of the artist's works, the present composition echoes the ambivalence (opposite concepts and dipoles: joy, happiness-unhappiness, security-insecurity, optimism-pessimism) that characterizes life in the city, life in the 21st century. Stevi's "Wave" could refer to the waves of the pandemic, in an uncertain future. At the same time, however, it nods to wonder, to change, to a wonderful new world.
Sofia Stevi notes about the painting on which her mural was based: "I call this painting "The Wave / The Wave" - a pun on the English word "wave". A female figure beckons somewhere, while near her is a black cloud, like a wave, ready to swallow her. Perhaps this cloud symbolizes the future. The last few years have been quite difficult for humanity. The pandemic and climate change have made life difficult for many and unbearable for even more. We all need to make important decisions about the future of our beautiful planet. This work talks about the anxiety and uncertainty of living in such conditions, in a reality where bad news has become an everyday occurrence. But it also has to do with optimism and hope for change, which I believe is innate in human nature."
Every year, through commissions and on-site artistic interventions in the public space of the center of Athens, the Onassis Foundation Shelter looks for places where art is intertwined with everyday life. Through a series of projects that permeate the apartment buildings, great works of contemporary Greek visual artists are reborn on a large scale. After Ilias Papailiakis' "Kiss" in Avdi Square in Metaxourgeio, Stegi presents Sofia Stevi's "Wave / Wave" in Mavili Square. And there will be continuity.
Sofia Stevi was born in Athens in 1982. She creates paintings, sculptures, installations and artists' books - enigmatic, dreamlike compositions, where female sexuality, basically, finds demystified forms of expression, open to multiple interpretations. With references and inspiration from poetry, philosophy and digital media, she sets up her visual universe with dynamic, gestural strokes of Japanese ink and "cuffeti" colors, which refer to the fluid world of a fragmented animation.
She studied at the Vakalos School of Art & Design in Athens (2004) and Central Saint Martin's School in London (2009), and has presented her work in many group and individual exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Specifically, in 2017 she held her first solo exhibition in Athens, at The Breeder gallery, while her works were hosted in 2018 at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Great Britain, in 2019 at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London and, more recently, the 2021, at the Alma Zevi (now Paterson Zevi) gallery in Venice, where he chose to present work on a smaller scale, painted in a quiet palette of tonalities that oscillate between white and black. Stevi is one of the visual artists presented by the New Museum of New York, in collaboration with the DESTE Foundation, at the Benaki Museum on Piraeus Street, in the exhibition "The Equilibrists" (2016). Finally, he is the creator of the artistic project Fokidos, which, based in an apartment in Ampelokipi, develops a dynamic visual dialogue in the city of Athens, through exhibitions, performances and speeches.
