Artist: Amalia Vekri
Exhibition title: After Dark
Venue: The Breeder, Athens, Greece
Date: June 8 – August 31, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Breeder
“One day I started a painting. I began by applying silver whispers on the canvas: A young girl is sitting alone on the ground, her feelings evaporating from the earth forming a forest of protective fumes. The young girl looks pensive, but she is in fact ready: Her eyes have begun to sprout bat wings, and it looks like she has something in her mouth. Her new vampire teeth? I hate you, I will destroy you, I cannot be without you.”
-Amalia Vekri, fake quote
Amalia Vekri’s paintings act like some weird hardcore psychoanalytic portraits of situations, like the drawings your cognitive behavioural analyst will ask you to make of your fantasy, and the words the fantasy whispers to you. In Amalia Vekri’s paintings there is never text, never a clear description of what is exactly going on, and they look nothing like the drawings I mentioned. Sometimes the swirls are so strong that the figures drown in a foreground background ambiguity storm. You even have to squint to actually see what is going on inside the mesmerizing silver fumes of passion and lust.
In one of these situations, the fumes become female figures, with spooky eyes growing on body parts, arms become bat wings and now the female figures are passionately kissing. Amalia draws inspiration from horror / vampire movies like Vamp, starring Grace Jones as a vampire stripper seductress. For Vekri, the female vampire is a reversal of gender traditions because vampires make you their own when they prick your neck with their teeth, and by pricking we mean penetrating.
Vekri’s figures are free from societal expectations, yet in a constant negotiation with their soul, imagining and even enjoying going as far as possible in every direction. Through scenography and lighting, the exhibition itself becomes one of the situations that Amalia paints about, blurring the line between visiting a show and briefly inhabiting Amalia’s After Dark world.
-Andreas Angelidakis, 2023
Amalia Vekri lives & works in Athens. She studied at Vakalo College of Art & Design and at the University of Crete in Rethymno (Philosophy Studies Department). She holds a Masters from Central Saint Martins – UAL, in London. In 2021 she was awarded the Artworks Fellowship from the Niarchos Foundation. Selected recent exhibitions include: Midnight Daughter (solo), 1100 Broadway Studios, New York (2022); Narrative Framings, Callirrhoë, Athens (2022); T0 A New Era, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (2022); Performative Transcending Somatic Dinner, supported by NEON Foundation, Athens (2021), Prizing Eccentric Talents, P.E.T Projects, Athens (2021), Sisterhood Streaming Voices Unifying Energies, Korai space, Nicosia (2021), My Perversion is the Belief in Art, Pori Art Museum, Pori (2020-21), Avalon of the Heart (two person), P.E.T Projects, Athens (2020), The Same River Twice, co-organized by DESTE Foundation & the New Museum New York, Benaki Museum, Athens (2019), On the Risings and Settings of the Stars (solo), Aetopoulos, Athens (2019), Curved Arrows, Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Vienna (2019), The Breath that Leaves me, Stay Inside, Aarhus Art Weekend, Aarhus (2019) Cosmology, City Surfer Office, Prague (2019)
