Maria Kriara: The Pawnshop

A solo show by the Greek Maria Kriara (b.1982) whose aim is to unfold as a kind of phenomenological tour through images and selected phrases of ephemera of the past. They all manifest whether or how the narrative capacity of fragments (both as images and text) can provide insight into a broader current historical context.

The exhibition is an invitation to the artist and the viewers to reflect upon the recent greek history in order to revise grand narratives, myths and collective nostalgia surrounding our identity both as individuals and as a nation. The title of the show “The Pawnshop” suggests an anti-heroic epos in which the artist is not per se the one who “creates” rather the one who helps “erase”, “delete” and strip things off their dominant, mythical or sentimental connotations ; a kind of metaphorical pawnbroker. Kriara’s drawings attempt to create an “ark” of representations, a sort of Warburgian Atlas, similar to an encyclopedia or Voyager’s Golden Record.

She selects her subjects with an ‘interdisciplinary’ curiosity for images and for any kind of visual representation or documentation (texts and illustrations). Etchings, drawings, collages, photographs, etc. found in Encyclopedias, science essays, newspapers, magazines, Anatomy Atlases, graphic novels, online archives like the NASA photographic archive or the archive of LIFE magazine and of course within the history of art.