We are immensely excited about Art Athina and bringing together two intriguing artists Margret Eicher and Yonamine. In their work it is hard to miss the reference to contemporary events, both find a very specific language to address popular culture, personalities that dominate the masses and political figures.
Yonamine‘s work brings together elements such as painting, drawing, graffiti, photography, video, and other media such as tattooing in installations that fill space and sites. As a whole, one might describe Yonamine‘s works as ranging between evocative spatial diaries or even archeological examinations. He merges a series of situations that oscillate between the past, the present, and a possible future, offering a concept of time that escapes limitation. Like the terminology of a DJ, his works bring to mind the concept of rewinding, of a close tie to the past, while being based in the present. The way he assembles his works in a process of seemingly random assemblage and fragmentation can tell us a great deal about our own identities and fragmented selves. He thus sheds light on ever-changing, fragile identities that are subject to many different kinds of violence.
Margret Eicher‘s work is located at the interface between material artworks in the traditional sense and the electronic noise of the digital. Eicher is drawn to the contemporary trivial image clichés of magazines and the internet; the garish, mendacious beauty of high-end surfaces in which current events and the image of humanity are reflected. Through a multi-layered digital reorganization, she reduces these snippets of everyday media to their implied definitions of human existence. The pictorial form of courtly tapestry cited by Eicher interweaves the contemporary event image under her direction: the catastrophe, the portrait, and the figure scene leave their fleeting triviality and take on a typifying character. In the confrontation and interweaving of the historical medium of representation - the courtly tapestry - and today‘s communication media, the power of the image can be experienced and with it the scope of the encoded, complex value statements and world views.