Konstantina Krikzoni

Konstantina Krikzoni is a Greek artist, based in London.

Her practice manifests a space between the figurative and the abstract, where bodily forms transcend and transform. Working with oil paint, watercolour, casts made of rubber and textiles, she creates organic shape distortions and explores the constraints and liberation of human existence. 

She studied Painting at the School of Visual and Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2015) and Mathematics at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the same university (2010). 

She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2020) and of the NEON Foundation for Culture and Development scholarship (2020/21, 2021/22) and she was shortlisted for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship (2021) and the Chadwell award (2022) in London, UK. 

She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021). 

Selected Group exhibitions

2022 Emotions are facts, Nosbaum Reding Gallery, Luxembourg

2022 Hypnagogia, 20 Rue de la Poudriere, Brussels, Belgium

2021 How did I get here, Oldenburger Str Project Space, Berlin, Germany

2021 The ceiling with a tranquil eye, Cork Street Galleries and Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom

2021 Les Danses Nocturnes, Spread Museum and the Visual Arts Agency France VAAF , Entrevaux, France

2020 ELF, Schaufenster Gallery, Berlin, Germany

2020 Rooms 2020, Kappatos Gallery, Athens, Greece

2019 L’artiste et les commissaires, Lage Egal Gallery, Berlin, Germany

2019 All out, KWADRAT Gallery, Berlin, Germany

2018 Demi-gros, Safe-Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Gabriele D'Annunzio - “ The richest experiences happen long before the soul takes notice. And when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have already been supporters of the invisible for a long time.”

Through various degrees of fantasy, abstraction, fragmentation and atmosphere, my work presents the female anatomy in  complex ways. I challenge how the body has traditionally been represented, fetishised or objectified with its reduction to sexualized body parts within art history, and how female bodily functions in particular are ‘abjected’ by a patriarchal social order.  

Symbols and images are interconnected in a blend of history, mythology and the personal. Figures dwell in fluid, changing settings are constantly modified and reshaped by the actions and associations of the human body. And at the same time, they seem to be on the brink of disappearing, insisting on remaining in the shadows, under the night light, inside the belly!

I address ideas such as shame, fragility, anxiety, disgust and phobias. The works are built with self- destruction, obeying the disordered and the poetic. Female figures become transformative, transgressive, divine, ethereal spirits. They are travelers, sleepwalkers and ghosts with the attitudes of seductive ambivalent beings, distorted multitaskers, selfish shapeshifters and sexual parasites. They reveal internal conflicts and compositional pandemonia, in my studio, my demons and I. 

A choreography physically manifested in various psychological states.

I infuse my energy, I perform on the canvas.

Tactility forms a part of my visual language and collage and embroidery become symbolic. Stitching has a strong physicality, reminiscent of a veil flowing and healing trauma. My latex works operate like a hybridic second skin, parasitic and perplexing, oscillating between permanence and ephemerality. It has the potential to augment and to veil. And like us it hardens, it decays and it changes.

Konstantina Krikzoni, 2022