Art Seen is delighted to announce Spyros Anastasiou's first solo exhibition The Alchemy of Story Telling opening on Thursday, 13^th of October 2022. The exhibition will showcase a new body of works including a site-specific installation. For his debut exhibition, Anastasiou invites the viewer to experience his practice through his own storytelling reflected on sculptures made of marble and plaster.

Anastasiou characteristic fixation with forms, patterns and fragments of figures follows a strategy of repetition. This repetition creates a sculptural alchemy of the initial form that transforms itself into an energy of shape. While subconsciously exploring his own identity as a Cypriot, personal and mythological stories create a new reading for the audience, signifying Anastasiou as the storyteller that brings forward an experience of imaginary rituals and innocence.

While in an almost perpetual identity crisis of his own origins, Anastasiou fixates on “hair” being the symbol that remains constant throughout his work. He reflects upon his fascination with the ancient sculpture of Kouros and its representation of youth and male beauty through repetitive variations of the sculpture’s spherical hair patterns.

Anastasiou’s work is the innocent simplification of the archetypal patterns of Kouros and its antecedent Sumerian and Egyptian sculptures. Like a DNA strand that can be traced all the way back to ancient civilizations, the archetype of the spherical hair patterns, the body language as well as the material approach to the male figure has undergone minimal modifications. Hair is as close you can get to the alchemy of a person and through these sculptures Anastasiou is attempting to extract and explore his own DNA as a storyteller, an alchemist, a magician.

Spyros Anastasiou

b. 1990 in Limassol, Cyprus.

He lives and works in Phematismenos, Cyprus.

Anastasiou studied a Foundation course in Farnham UCA. He started a Bachelors in Business Management and Tourism in Sunderland University but decided to pursue the Arts. He studied a Bachelor Degree, in the Sculpture Department at the Academia di Belle Arti di Carrara where he graduated in 2020. In 2011, he participated in LT RANCH project in in Lithuania (the non-profit rural art space is providing a facility for residencies of spatial research for two weeks. In 2017 he was an assistant for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Since 2020 he holds the position of Lab Assistant at Cyprus University of Technology (TEPAK) in Limassol. He has participated in the ‘Segni Scolpiti Montinigioso’ Symposium in Italy and at the group exhibitions Attempts to Escape (2019) and All I Need is the Air that I Breathe at Art Seen gallery in Nicosia (2021), Beuys100 - Social Sculptures at Goethe-Institute in Cyprus(2021).

Opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday 16:00 – 19:30

or by appointment

For more information, please contact:

Maria Stathi, Founder & Director, Art Seen
+357 22006624

info@art-seen.org
www.art-seen.org