CURRENT | UPCOMING | PAST

apostolos karastergiou
brochures for an exotic vacation

rigo schmidt
unknown people in leading positions

23 MARCH – 30 APRIL

APOSTOLOS KARASTERGIOU

Apostolos Karastergiou (born in 1973) lives and works in Athens. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1999. He has also received an MA from the University of East London in 2003. Karastergiou has participated in a number of solo and group shows. 

Karastergiou's work explores the interrelation between nature and culture, and also the individual and societal experience of its results. Borrowing his subject matter mainly from existing sources of information, the artist attempts not only to introduce an aesthetic dimension to environmental degradation of the Amazon River basin and the Malay Archipelago but also to reveal the harsh exploitation of these regions by the western civilization. 

Intervening into the pictorial traditions of botany, Karastergiou accomplishes to realize a genre which examines the nature both as visual object and self-contained value. 
The body of the current project consists of two geophysical modified maps, a unity of subtle painted stamps, a number of delicate illustrations of orchids on pictures of original books published in the 19th century, and two series of correspondence between the artist and two botanists.

 

RIGO SCHMIDT

If one considers museums representative containers of history, they preserve and display a continuous, expanding repertoire of culture and scholarship: stuffed, preserved, petrified, behind glass, or on canvas, selections of the developpment of man and his surroundings are presented, seeming legible like a picture book. But what becomes legible here is less a history of culture or science itself, but the history of its representation, linked to the relationship of a civilization to its objects of display. From here, Rigo Schmidt looks back to two lines of developpment that affect his own perception as a painter: the evolution of humanity as part of surrounding nature, and humanity's attempts to distinguish himself from his surrounding nature by way of culture and science.

The antiquated atmosphere of natural history museums shimmers through his images as well as the constructed nature of a scientific worldview that has produced this form of museum representation. Small, finely worked formats at first seem to continue this fascination for isolated object studies - they even seem to adopt this pose. But behind this lies the observation of observation, and thus the study of civilized surroundings as an already mediated image. For Rigo Schmidt often finds his subjects where nature and reality were already once filtered: in photographs, paintings, or showcases they were "cropped" in their natural context and brought to a standstill.

(Excerpt translated from a text by Bettina Reichmuth)