SKINd Signs of purity MISJA KRISTOFFER RASMUSSEN and RASCHMIE SOUKOULIS
The Bath House of the Winds
From November 3rd to December 3rd, 2018, the Museum of Modern Greek Culture at the Bath House of the Winds in Athens (Greece) is hosting an exhibition dedicated to Misja Kristoffer Rasmussen, a Danish sculptor who lives and works between Denmark and Italy, more specifically Pietrasanta, a town in Tuscany internationally famous for its strong sculpture tradition. The event brings together about twenty pieces by Misja Kristoffer Rasmussen offering an overview of the influence that the city of Athens has had on his art in twenty years of work.
The exhibition is the end result of the artist’s collaboration with The Danish Institute at Athens (DIA), where the sculptor had the opportunity to intensify his research: "Step by step, layer by layer, I learned to scratch under the contemporary concrete skin of Athens: the city gradually taught me how, and when, to discover and rediscover my inspiration.“ The deep traces of the city – her history, monuments, ruins, streets, the outline of her hills and the sea – are visible on every corner with intense, complex, muddled, conflicting meanings, which overlap like layers of the same skin, the artist finds that essential note that characterizes all his works.
“At first sight Misja Kristoffer Rasmussen might be taken for a nostalgic imitator of classical art, an interpreter of the image, intent on reproducing the stylistic features of Greek statuary with painstaking precision; but only an absent-minded observer could fail to miss the modernity at the soul of his inspiration. Indeed he uses the ancient world as a starting point, only to reinterpret it and relive it in a strongly contemporary mould.
I am not simply referring to the purely external aspects of an iconographic or thematic nature, but to the exquisitely formal features, the restless feverish way his hands work to pluck out such vigour, energy and the spontaneous exuberance of life from the inert clay.” (Prof. Cosimo Strazzeri, art Critic and historian)
Misja Kristoffer Rasmussen has chosen to invite to the exhibition the young Greek artist Raschmie Soukoulis with whom he met at the Athens School of Fine Arts during his residency at DIA.
For this exhibition, Rashmie Soukoulis has created a set of visual voices that unfold in the historical space of the Bath House of the Winds narrating a single story through three sections.
The first series consists of painted acrylic paintings as “the experience of the visitors of the baths who touched their bodies bare on the marble for the "ritual" of the Hamam, the artist used the body itself in an abstract, expressionistic way as a brush creates vibrant human traces.” (Venthesikimi Kotsafti, art historian)
From the immaterial form of the bodies the visitors will meet, in the second section, a series of elaborately crafted woodcuts. Raschmie Soukoulis, with particular artistic intelligence, started from special footwear of the time using material presence and naked absence to talk about the expectations of a society.
In the last series “her creation moves on to a set of overpainted gilded engravings with bold symbolism.” (V.K)
“Raschmie Soukouli's works extend into space as recordings of internal searches, as historical notes of an endless question that swirls every human soul, as palimpsest testimonies of a human who, looking around and inside, will find traces of death and traces of life.” (V.K)
“Misja Kristoffer Rasmussen takes his cue from Greek statuary, but reinterprets it in the light of contemporary chromatic values, highlighting, via the chromatism of the aged patina, chromatic rather than plastic values and conveying, through the prominent fractures that cross faces and bodies, the crisis of modern man and his inability to reconstruct an organic cultural synthesis to replace that of the past.” (C.S.)
The mystιcal character of the Bath house combines the contemporary creation of artists in a timeless atmosphere. Visitors discovering the works of two modern artists in a distinctive yet imaginative way in the intersection of the Baths of the Winds, a Monument dating back to the first period of Ottoman rule (1430-1669), will enjoy a journey in space and time, in memory and imagination, sensations and illusions.
Vernissage
3rd of November, 2018, 1200
Open: 3rd of November - 3rd of December 2018
Visiting Hours: 8.00 – 15.00, everyday except Tuesday
The Bath House of the Winds
8 Kyrristou str., Plaka.
Athens
FURTHER INFORMATION
The Danish Institute at Athens
Web site: https://diathens.gr/
Official facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/danish.institute.athens/
Misja Kristoffer Rasmussen
Web site: http://www.misjaart.com/
Official facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Misja-Kristoffer-Rasmussen-365264403551043/
Raschmie Soukoulis
Web site: https://www.raschmie-soukoulis.com/
