Jannis Varelas introduces Anima I

After his solo exhibition “Monster” presented at the Onassis Stegi in 2017, the performance “New Flags for a New Country / Destroying Elvis” (2016), as well as the Onassis USA commission "Black Frames” (2017), the visual artist Jannis Varelas collaborates once again with Onassis Foundation to present an enigmatic and notably personal painting exhibition at the Benaki Museum.

With “Anima I”, Jannis Varelas goes back to the images of the body, exploring the gendered cultural representations of the human figure. The artist chooses his models among his friends and neighbors, and has them dressed specifically to be photographed in the specially laid out setting of his studio. The photographic rendering of the event provides the semantic raw material; it is then transferred onto the canvas, transformed and diffracted by the language of painting.

The new series of paintings by Varelas pose questions on the concepts of identity and alterity, iconophilia and iconoclasm, the self, sameness and difference, the normal and the abnormal, impulse and repulsion, melancholy and ecstasy, the binary and the multiple gender. The display encompasses paintings, scrapbooks, archive material, photographs, a selection of everyday objects from the Collections of the Benaki Museum, collages, video and costumes from the preparatory stages of the performative process.

“Anima I” will be hosted on the second floor of the Benaki Museum's Pireos St. building from 12 September to 17 November 2019.

Organized by: Benaki Museum