ELENI GLINOU, Artist
Please click on the images to view them in bigger size. Copyright art and photos © 1997 Eleni Glinou
BIOGRAPHY
Born: 1963, Greece
Studies:
1983-88 Academy of Fine Arts of Athens.
Subjects: Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, history of Architecture, history of Art, Byzantine studies, philosophy of Aesthetics.
1988-89 Attended the course "Developing Skills on English writing" at the School of social research in New York,(one semester).
1992-94 Master's program on Printmaking, Royal college of Arts.
1994-95 Master's Program on Interactive Multimedia, Royal college of Arts-London School of Printing.
Work Experience:
1985-88 assistant organizer of the museum of the History of Writing of Athens.
1989-92 teaching at secondary education for three years,
1995-96 full-time tutor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Athens,
1995 cooperated on the design of the CD-ROM for the presentation of the development of the European Program "Esprit".
1995-97 Teaching at the Printmaking department of the School of Fine arts of Athens. Also preparing the publication of a CD-ROM on philosophy
1998. Full time Professor School of Graphic Design, Technological Institute of Athens, Greece.
Exhibitions:
1988. Printmaking Show at the central Cultural center of Athens
1990. Tour show of the collection "Tassos", Greece.
1994. Degree Show of Printmaking Henry Moore gallery.
1994. Group Show ,Shad Gallery,London, UK.
1995. Two Artists Show "Illeana Tounda " gallery Athens, Greece.
1996. Group Show "house of Cyprus" Gallery, Athens, Greece.
1996. Group show "Vilka" gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece.
1996. Group Show ,Rome Art fair, 50 Art galleries from all over Europe.
1996. Group Show "Metamodernita",Palazzo Bricherasio Torino Italy.
1997 Group Show, Nairi Suhakian contemporary art fair, London, UK.
1997. Group Show, Mont Rouge, France.
1997. Group Show, "women of two seas" Mediterranean and Black sea,organized by Unesco,Thessaloniki,Greece.
1998. Arco Art Fair "Ileana Tounta" Contemporary Art Centre, Madrid, Spain.
1998 Art Athina 98, "Ileana Tounta" Contemporary Art Fair, Athens, Greece.
Essays:
"The first two decades of the Russian Art", study on the routs of the movements developed during the period.
"The reverse course of the travel of Ulysses', a poetic investigation of the Myth.
"The tools as mediums of Expression",an essay for the students of Graphics.
"The mind and the Machine", a study on the non apparent sides of the issue.
Publications:
Catalogue for the Show at RCA June 1994.
Review on the Show in "Illeana Tounda" gallery, in Eleftherotypia and Nea newspapers, June1995.
Catalogue for the show at the House of Cyprus.
Catalogue for the show at Torino, Published by the foundation of Palazzo Bricherasio
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EXHIBITION 1999, Athens, Greece - Chicago, U.S.A.
Life emerged in fhe cold blue oceans
Proud men built powerful vessels and reached to the corners of the worlds
Bringing war and peace with them
Peace is the time
To be born, to die;
To plant to reap;
To weep, to laugh;
To mourn, to dance;
To love, to hate;
To kill and heal;
I reminiscence, and pray as I fly with the wind above the bafflefields
As the new dawn rises this spring day
May peace engulf the fields and the seas
And wipe away the tears of our feverish eyes for we long to live more
PANAGIOTIS TSALIKIDIS
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Eleni chose to use original photos from several Second World War sea-battles as basic material for her work, from which she decided to eliminate aII traces of the battleships. She only kept the images of the explosions transforming them as weII, though, into dream-Iike flower nebulae, through digital manipulation.
The new images that are generated from this process are carrying inside them an incredible power, being the synthesis of two deeply contradictive circumstances: that of exploding momentary and devastating and that of blooming tranquil, sIow and essential for creating Iife. And its quite strange how we may find both these elements in the world around us and aIso in the inside of us coexisting or succeeding one another the way we see it happening in Eleni´s artistic work.
Most of us have gone through battles and wars in our Iives combats that Ieave disasters behind them which are aII meticulously recorded In our memory. But human memory is Iike a magic box that doesn' t merely store, but constantly transforms and processes its data, especially those that are related to wars and explosive situations: such occurrences are the catalysts of aII change, they are what made us the way we are and what keeps changing us stiII. If we don't let them destroy us, they can only help us to go further, to bloom, to transform ourselves in the course of time into something more beautiful and alive. Time can heal the scars of any war and in our minds flower may grow where only death existed once, to honor what´s lost and to welcome what's to be born.
Its exactly this Iong and complicated procedure that is being described with a great sense of visual economy in each peace of Eieni's work. She herself says that she put flowers over the war Iandscapes, wishing to heal the cause of any combat, personal or collective, that might cause the separation from one s self or from one's surroundings. In fuII conscience, then, she mokes with her work a very important point: that every explosion from the past has a quiet but continuous and creative outburst, expanding throughout the future.
MARILENA GLINOU
