The Greek artist's exhibition Images through Matter charts a decades-long career investigating the elements and materials that make the city, separating and reconstructing its layers in a fascination with the urban fabric
While so many have found inspiration in Athens’s great Classical heritage, for artist Rena Papaspyrou, it was the city’s more mundane building fabric that struck a chord. Peeling walls, floors, fragments of wood, metal, cloth and general building detritus have been her palette in a career stretching six decades.
Long celebrated in Greece, she now has her first UK exhibition, Images Through Matter, at The Hellenic Centre in central London.
The show is something of a capsule retrospective of a body of work aptly described, as ‘a house built over 60 years’ by critic Christoforos Marinos. Held in the soaring space of what was once a Swedish gymnasium, it showcases her changing techniques from performative peeling of building walls on the streets of her neighbourhood through to casts of staircases and assemblages of construction fragments, some subtly annotated in delicate ink and pencil.
Speaking through an interpreter, Papaspyrou explained that she had found inspiration in the urban landscape from a very early age, initially from the domestic rooms around her and then outside from uninhabited buildings, where she ‘took all the essential materials for her work’. While she has always been ‘driven by the surfaces that she finds’, she says as she changed over time, so did her processes.
The exhibition includes her first detachment project from 1979, in which she used glue to detach surface layers of buildings in the street – a very public process (Stilponos 7 (Episodes in Matter)). These fragments are shown alongside photos documenting the process to show how the surface has been transferred from building to artwork and placed in a way, as the artist says, to ‘start another conversation’.
Another way of responding to the building fabric is explored in Photocopies directly from Matter, created from 1980-82. This depicts images of building fragments collected on her way to work at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where she later became the first female professor to direct her own workshop. The resulting bank of 216 photocopies captures images of these fragments, as well as the artist’s hand and face.
In some works, Papaspyrou incorporates building fragments into assemblages of samples, arranged en masse by material in a kind of palette. She describes the piece 1995 Images Through Matter as something of a thought bubble from inside her head in that it shows samples of all the elements from the urban landscape that are central to her work – paper, wood, metal, wall and floor surfaces. Other artworks use larger elements of detached wall layers.
Many of her works incorporate associative images in ink interventions. Papaspyrou says she works by looking at the material and ‘recognising the presence of an image’ personal to her, and then intervening with ink and pencil to make it visible to others, whether the outline of a big-eared creature, trees or a face. She hopes that this will encourage viewers to look and see other images personal to them.
In one of her more recent works, the 2018 Images in Matter floor piece, an installation of 75 terrazzo tiles is enhanced by images, mostly faces suggested by the random pattern, with flecks becoming eyes, or a mouth, for example.
In Staircases, a piece from the same year, Papaspyrou used paper casts to create five sections of staircases from the building where she works, one with her footsteps shown. These are displayed suspended swaying gently in the vast gallery space.
While her work has always been about communicating through the fabric of the city, the pandemic of 2020 prompted a more overt approach. At a time when social contact was severely restricted and people needed permission to leave the house, she began a project on the graffitied wall of a derelict house, using glue to detach layers stretching back over 40 years to reveal the inner skin of the layers. This urban archaeology turned into something of a diary, with Papaspyrou recording the dates of when she visited and leaving little messages for her friends to encounter when they were able to leave their houses. Entitled The Unknown Side, this piece of textured building layers has centre stage in this intriguing insight into a lifetime of work created out of the city itself.
When she started working with the city fabric in the 1960s, Papaspyrou wanted to see where the materials would take her. All these years later and now in her mid-80s, she says she still hasn’t explored all the possibilities.
Rena Papaspyrou Images Through Matter, until November 16, The Hellenic Centre, 16-18 Paddington Street, London W1U 5AS