Zoumboulakis Galleries invite you to the new solo exhibition of Miltos Golemas titled “Sunflowers”, opening on Thursday, May 12, 2022.
On his fifth solo exhibition, Miltos Golemas returns to nature. Sunflowers that seem to speak out loud, spread out fields, light even in the silent, extensive night. Within the two years of the pandemic, Golemas sought and achieved to bring the nature into his studio. Its beneficial, universal effect on his work becomes absolutely obvious. The sunflowers breathe, and through them so do humans. With his unique technique, he transforms the canvas into a setting where the human presence is revealed only through the viewer who observes and participates mystagogically.
The author Zyranna Zateli who wrote the catalogue text notes: “A strange thing that in all the vast firmament, there should be no Constellation of the Sunflower.
Or, that there should be no myth in folk tradition, as far as we know, about a plant with such an exemplary connection to the sun’s course: helianthus, girasol, heliotrope… Unless such a myth is as ‘undercover’ as the sunflower’s innermost folds, its very secret heart.
What I discerned or intuited in Golemas’ sunflowers, from the very first moment I laid eyes on them at his studio one freezing day of March, was precisely the invisible interior of something organic, which we usually only attend to during the season of its triumphant flowering: that dazzling, almost overbearing, beauty that assails us on seeing, for instance, an immense field of sunflowers.
Here, too, they are amply glorious, ‘planted’ inside those paintings with incalculable mastery, even if they appear infused with a melancholy that cuts across all seasons and times of the day, whether the sun is in mid heaven or setting. The point of art being, it might be said, the transubstantiation of the real into a depiction, one that is still, yes, but deeply sensual, enlivened on its own right, and iridescent.
Large scale canvases painted with oil and sand, along with some small scale ones, will be presented.
ViewingRoom
ExhibitionWorks
Sunflowers, 2021, Oil and sand on canvas, 20x40 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Nocturne, 2021, Oil and sand on canvas, 20x40 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Road, 2021, Oil and sand on canvas, 20x40 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Summer Gust, 2020, Oil and sand on canvas, 99x117 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Nocturne, 2022, Oil and sand on canvas, 99x126 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Portent, 2021-2022, Oil and sand on canvas, 180x225 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Night of the Sunflower, 2021-2022, Oil and sand on canvas, 171x243 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Sun's Favor, 2021, Oil and sand on canvas, 180x243 cm, photo credit by Leonidas Dimakopoulos
Miltos Golemas (b. Athens, 1967) started painting with N. Stefou before he studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under the painter P. Tetsis. His works are part of many private and public collections like, the National Gallery of Greece Collection and the Emfietzoglou Collection. “Sunflowers” is his fifth solo presentation following: “Under Construction” Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens, 2017, “Under the Sky”, Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens, 2011, “Places of Rust and Salt”, Metamorfosi Art Gallery, Thessaloniki, 2008, “Floating Tanks”, Zou...
