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Labyrinths Comics and Contemporary Visual Arts

On the occasion of the Cultural Year of Greece in China, the Labyrinths exhibition aspired to increase communication between two ancient civilizations via contemporary artistic expression. Labyrinths, which was held in the 798 Art Space from January 12 to February 15, included comics, illustrations and graphic design, street art, sculptural and video installations, portraying significant aspects of Greek contemporary art.

Young contemporary Greek artists are inspired by urban landscapes, which they transform in their own distinctive ways. Eastern, Greek and Byzantine influences meet with modern and western images and ways of expression, seeking to narrate stories of everyday life. The creative process is strongly related to the dimension of time—especially to the quality of the ephemeral—as their fundamental aim is artistic exchange and not the creation of an art object that will last forever. The mix of various forms, whether painting, sculpture, theatre direction, literature, architecture, to create new forms of art, as well as the use of new technologies and a combination of classical painting with digital images, are also important features of modern artistic expression.

The exhibition presented many different aesthetic trends, including comics, all of which stressed images rather than words, offered by 13 of the most important Greek comics artists that have exhibited or published their work in Greece and internationally.

Three of the most distinctive new representatives of this genre in Greece, and two members of the younger generation were exhibited.

Miss Katerina, curator and artist of Labyrinths, said: “Installations are a new trend that allows visual artists to intervene in a space by creating parallel worlds/works of art where the spectator is not just a person looking at them from a distance but is seduced to participate, to enter into the works, to ramble through them, to become a part of them: a process that results in an all-embracing physical sensation (image, sound, movement in space).

“Designing a set for the everyday space, and not a theatrical one, and using diverse elements, from works of art to common materials and objects, the artists created compositions that depend on the existing environment into which—and for which—they are assembled. When an installation is disassembled, its parts will continue to exist, however their overall combination and the specific aesthetic result will be lost forever.”