Olga Alexopoulou

The historian Heinrich Hall notes “Alexopoulou is a painter with an obsession - the colour blue. For her, blue is not just a pleasant accident of sea or sky or faraway hills, blue is a world unto itself. This is a story of clay and metal, of millennia and moments, of ancient Chinese craftsmen and a young Greek artswoman, of science and of magic, of ideas being turned upside down, of art, of grey and white and especially of blue. The search for blue has led her in many directions: in the past, she has engaged with Prussian Blue (a dispersion of ferrocyanides) and Ultramarine (another mineral pigment). In 2011, she set her sights on Cobalt Blue, by going to Jingdezhen, China, the centre of blue-and-white porcelain production.” The images in the current exhibition are from the porcelain paintings she did in Jingdezhen. The historian Nikos Sigalas continues “austere in words (in the signs of men) yet powerful as the hour of the tempest or a summit’s moment of illumined unconcealment. Olga Alexopoulou is sparing with words, her images speaking in silence, mute words in a language beyond the common sign, a turbulence of depth. How far beyond language reposes a summit, an arctic landscape, a thriving anemone, the sea itself. What is communicated through Olga’s work is that art, mirroring nature, remains forever untamed, impossible to be exhausted by our ambitions. It lies exactly where those ambitions end, in the vast untamed dominions that life’s communion with the imagination opens up before us; in the stars, the seas and summits that exist all around, while dwelling deep within.”